The Bradshaw Variations Read Online Free PDF Page A

with round cheeks encrusted with make-up and acne. He strikes at them with this ironic-sounding drawl: he makes them seem unfortunate and stupid.
    ‘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