The Bradshaw Variations Read Online Free PDF

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