‘Is there anyone you can call?’ the nurse asks him.
She is suspicious of him, he can tell. She is wondering where Alexa’s mother is.
‘I can’t get through at the moment,’ he says.
Apparently there is nothing anyone can do. There is only waiting. Thomas, in the car park, rings Tonie again. There is a boulder of guilt in his chest. His fingers shake as he presses the numbers. He expects the terror of her voice at any moment. But as the hours pass he grows accustomed to her silence, her absence. His guilt transfers itself, becomes anger, is transformed yet again into peace, the pure peace of responsibility. He remembers waiting in this hospital for Alexa to be born. His concern was all for Tonie then, for her pain. Now, in a sense, the pain is his. He is being broken, broken at last. He does not believe that Alexa will die. But for her to live he has to be broken, as Tonie was once broken. He has to offer it up, finally: the way he was, the way he will never again be.
Towards midnight the door to the little white room opens. It is Olga.
‘Hello, Olga,’ Thomas says. He is only moderately surprised. He has forgotten that he is not in the kitchen at home.
‘I am here,’ Olga says.
‘Yes,’ Thomas says. ‘Thank you for coming.’
She sits down beside him, her hands clasped in her lap.
‘This is a terrible thing,’ she says.
Thomas nods. The doctor has told him there is a possibility that Alexa’s hearing will be damaged. And a silence has descended on him, thick and blank, like snow. He sits shaking in his chair, enveloped in suffocating silence. There is no thread of sound to pull him out. He finds himself thinking about ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. He visualises the words on the page, like black little armies marching across the whiteness. The book is still in his pocket.
‘I forgot’, Thomas says, ‘that you work here.’
‘Yes,’ Olga says. ‘Tonight, for no reason, they put me on this ward. It was lucky.’
The silence comes again, so heavy and blank.
‘I was reading a book earlier today,’ Thomas says, ‘about a man who kills his wife for playing the piano.’
His voice is scratchy and faint. He can barely force it out of his throat. Alexa’s eyes are open. She is looking at him out of her ghastly face, as though she is listening. But he can see she doesn’t recognise him.
‘The man blames it all on the music,’ he continues. ‘He says that under the influence of music, people feel things that are not their true feelings. They think they understand something when in fact they don’t understand it at all. It’s all a sort of illusion, like love.’
Olga stares at him.
‘That is a bad book,’ she says finally.
‘Yes,’ he says. If he hadn’t been reading it, he might have taken more notice of Alexa. He might have been aware that he was being tested. Suddenly he can’t bear to have the book in his pocket any longer. He takes it out and throws it into the bin. Then he sits down again.
‘You should read happy books,’ says Olga. ‘Why make life more difficult?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says.
What is art? It is, perhaps, a distillation of the difficulty, like the hospital brochure — a kind of knowledge after the fact, a description of what cannot be known until it is lived, by which time it is too late to know it. When he plays the piano he is not living. He is describing what it lies beyond his own capacity to redeem.
‘I don’t know why,’ he says. ‘I’ve never really thought about it. Do you read happy books?’
It is midnight. There is total blackness at the windows. He sees his own reflection in the glass. It is fractured, splintered, a composition of a million separate lines.
‘I read magazines,’ Olga says.
XXXI
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 ordeaclass="underline" 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.