‘Thanks.’
‘I’ll walk with you,’ he says.
Janine rolls her eyes, waves her hand, makes a run for it in her silver shoes.
‘I have the feeling I interrupted something important there,’ Martin says, with professorial satisfaction. ‘I was watching your face. You looked — wistful. Sort of sad, but thoughtful.’
He does an imitation of it, there in the crowded corridor. He rests his fingers under his chin and gazes into the middle distance.
‘Thanks,’ she says again.
They go left and right and left along the grey-walled passages with their littered noticeboards and chipped paint, and Martin sticks to her as they push through the field of bodies, saying, ‘Hello,’ and, ‘How are you?’ to those students who raise their eyes to him. Instantly they look troubled, slightly guilty, as though their individuality was something they were meant to be concealing. She sees no blaze of youth in these faces, these bodies: they have bad skin, piercings, stiff, artificial-looking hair. They look pensive, irresolute, like people who have got off a train in the wrong town. They look like people to whom nothing has ever been explained.
‘Hello, Jamie,’ Martin says in the lift, to a chalk-white boy with a petrified fan of hair like a cockatoo’s. ‘I’m glad that you found the time to come in today. Really, I’m glad.’
They get out, leave Jamie gaping and solitary in the steel cubicle, pass through the double doors to their offices.
‘We should have coffee some time,’ Martin says, leaning against the door frame where Tonie turns off.
Tonie wants to be in her office, tucked up alone in the grey rectangle with its view of the car park, but instead she says: ‘Do you think they’re enjoying themselves?’
Martin looks nonplussed. ‘Who?’
‘The students. Do you think they’re having a good time?’
Martin looks at the floor, focuses hard, as though he were being asked to guess at the feelings of a domestic pet.
‘You’re meaning in the mythological sense, right? Are they self-consciously inhabiting the myth of their own life? Does it mean to them what it meant to you? Right?’ He adjusts his glasses, rubs his pale chin. ‘The answer’s no.’
Tonie can hear her phone ringing inside the room. She rests her fingers on the door handle.
‘Oh look,’ Martin says. ‘They’ve put up your tombstone.’
She looks. There’s a new plaque fixed to the door: Dr A. Swann, Head of Department. Martin shakes his head.
‘You seem much too young for that,’ he says.
She laughs. ‘Well, I’m not.’
He looks, shakes his head again. ‘I just can’t see it,’ he says. ‘It isn’t you at all. I had you down as the faculty rebel. Obviously,’ he fixes her, microscope-eyed, ‘I was wrong.’
She smiles, unlocks the door, closes it gently behind her. The phone has stopped ringing. The room is silent. She sees the black swivel chair, the ledger diary, the stacks of files. She sees the car park with its grid of cars, three floors below. People are coming and going there, heads down, staring at the ground. The phone starts to ring again.
Martin Carson is unperceptive. This is the most rebellious thing she has ever done, by far.
III
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.