The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk Page B

there’s a car park and a big line of hotels – not to mention other film crews all going for the same thing and getting in each other’s way. Sometimes it’s a nightmare, getting what you want and keeping out what you don’t.’
    ‘ Terribly difficult,’ Claudia agrees.
    ‘But why can’t you show it as it really is?’ Tonie says. ‘What’s the point?’
    He frowns, puts his hands in his pockets. ‘People don’t want that sort of reality. And it isn’t my job to give it to them.’
    ‘Then you’re just a liar,’ Tonie says, but the room is noisy. She isn’t sure he’s heard her.
    ‘Hasn’t your wife had a baby?’ Claudia asks him. She says the word ‘baby’ as though it’s a big treat, something to reward him for having done so well. Tonie is surprised: she didn’t think Claudia knew this man. She is certain he doesn’t know Claudia’s name. He has not asked them one question about themselves: she and Claudia do not exist for him, they are just lines of perspective, ways for him to measure his location in space.
    ‘– six months old,’ he is saying. ‘I’ve barely seen her because of the filming. I think I’ve spent –’ he calculates ‘– one fortnight at home in the whole six months, you know? But that’s what it’s like to have a vocation. It’s hard, really hard. But that’s how it is. You have to make sacrifices.’
    Claudia looks almost tearful with sympathy, as though she were nothing to do with the person Tonie once witnessed screaming out of a top-floor window at Howard that she had bolted the door and wasn’t going to let him into the house, because Howard had promised to be home that night by a certain time to help her with the children, and had either broken the promise or forgotten it. Tonie thinks about Howard, considers him. In her mind he is suddenly very small, like a doll. He is ringed by destiny: he has become representational. Everything he has done and been has been compacted into this tiny figure, emitting the squeak of life. She sees him being moved as though by an invisible hand around a toy kingdom. She sees he could be dashed away in an instant.
    She leaves Claudia and pushes through the room. Later she finds herself talking to a man who makes coffins. He is threadbare, hippy-looking, with long grey hair. He makes the coffins by hand, out of wood from sustainable sources. He arranges natural funerals, in accordance with the wishes of the family. Tonie learns about the diversity of these wishes, their sources and outcomes. By now it is almost sexual, her desire to be penetrated by a question, but nobody asks her one. Instead she learns about the woodlands of Sussex and Kent, the tensile properties of the chestnut tree. There is African music playing, loud. Half of what the man says is blotted out. She watches his mouth moving. He glances at her frequently: he can tell she is untouched, disengaged.
    Suddenly Claudia is at her elbow, listening. She nods her head as the man speaks; she asks questions. He becomes aware of her, turns the stream of information in her direction. She is a more gratifying audience than Tonie. She asks about the coffin made of English oak. She asks about the ultra-sustainable willow model. Her interest is genuine, the man can tell. Tonie watches in consternation. Has Claudia gone mad? She feels suddenly that she was brought here to witness Claudia in an act of betrayal. It is the ineradicable quality of her dependence – on Howard, on men – that is being exposed tonight. Claudia puts a hand on the man’s arm. She is bright, transactional, faintly tragic in her fur collar.
    ‘Do you have a card?’ she asks him.
    ‘As it happens I do,’ the man says, producing one from his back pocket. ‘Are you anticipating a – passing?’
    For an instant Claudia looks both startled and mesmerised, like a snake being charmed out of its basket: her face is lit up, her mascaraed eyes unblinking. She takes the man’s card and puts it in her