The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk

be. I carried a torch for that old piano all through my dreary youth.’ He shudders. ‘It still makes me tingle all over to think of it.’
    Benjamin is listening, though he must have heard the story countless times before. His expression is respectful, uncontrolledly interested, and Thomas glimpses it, the ferment of love, surging like a dark river around the roots of his being. But the next minute he seems irritable, officious, plucking back his cuff to look at his watch.
    ‘We’re falling very behind with our lesson,’ he says. ‘We really must get on.’
    Ignatius puts his hand on Thomas’s shoulder, and Thomas realises that he is kind, kinder even than Benjamin, for love has not undermined him as it has his lover; and Thomas feels himself yearning suddenly for the solidity and sincerity of this second man, for his unethereal pungency, so different from Benjamin’s cleanly boyishness. It is as though their relationship has entered him and is enacting itself through his own senses.
    ‘The adagio was divine,’ he says, squeezing with his fingers. ‘You played it well.’
    *
    Another time, a grey turbulent afternoon, shadows falling and rolling heavily through the dim window of Benjamin’s room, the feet of passersby going past on the street above, litter whirling around their ankles. Ignatius is away, on tour in Germany. Benjamin has tidied up. He offers Thomas tea, and when it comes it is filmed with brown scum. Benjamin takes it away and brings back another in a clean cup. The door to the bedroom is ajar. Thomas can see the heavy flank of Ignatius’s grand piano, the lid closed. The room is so small that the bed acts as a piano stool. He wonders, shocked, how they survive like this. With Ignatius away, Benjamin’s atmosphere has already expanded, filling and marking the space. He imagines him tidying and putting things away. He imagines him closing the lid of the grand piano, satisfied.
    ‘I’ve actually managed to get some of my own work done,’ he says, like a housewife ritually oppressed by her husband’s success.
    Yet it is in this lesson that Benjamin changes things for Thomas. They sit together in front of the adagio .
    ‘It’s like a clock,’ Benjamin says. ‘Imagine you are inside a clock. The music is the mechanism.’
    He plays a few bars, fingers going up and down like hammers, head swinging from side to side like a pendulum. He makes ticking noises with his tongue against his teeth. Thomas laughs. Benjamin rewards him by ticking even louder and wagging his head so violently that his whole body rocks in its chair.
    ‘Tick tock tick tock –’
    He pounds the adagio with his hammer-like fingers, and suddenly Thomas understands that what Benjamin is talking about is time.
    When he gets home, he sits down at the piano and plays the adagio again. Alexa is there, standing in the doorway.
    ‘It’s like a clock,’ he tells her, tick-tocking along with the music like Benjamin did, but she doesn’t seem to understand, and when he tries to explain it to her he finds that he can’t.

XII
    Claudia calls. There’s a party she wants to go to but Howard is ill. She asks Tonie to go with her instead.
    Tonie agrees – she likes the unexpected. And it’s touching, sort of, that Claudia requires a chaperone, that after two decades of marriage she doesn’t quietly seize the chance to experience something on her own. She picks Tonie up in her dog-smelling estate car. It is a black, penetrating night. Claudia is wearing something with a fur collar, like a Russian aristocrat. Her eyelids are bruised-looking, the mascaraed lashes tarred into spikes. Her hair is untidy, her nails bitten, her earrings expensive. In the yellow street lamps she has a pleasing look of degeneracy.
    ‘They’re such interesting people,’ she says of their hosts.
    ‘What’s wrong with Howard?’
    Claudia makes an exasperated sound, lifting her hands from the steering wheel.
    ‘Don’t even ask! I’ve been beside myself –