Often, on Sundays, Thomas and Tonie find themselves on their way to Laurier Drive, for in spite of the topiary and the Union Jacks drooping on their polished flagpoles, Howard and Claudia’s domain has the magnetism of cultural centrality. Usually, in the car, Tonie complains: she would like their own house to draw and pull the world to itself, or so she thinks. But she is often uneasy and out of sorts when they have visitors. It is this, Thomas supposes, that she is complaining about. She would like to be different, while not understanding precisely what the difference is.
Today, though, she is quiet in the passenger seat. It is late September, a brilliant, brittle day. He glances at her frequently: she seems to revolve in banks of sunlight that fall across her through the windscreen. She puts on her dark glasses, stares out of the window. Since she started her new job, he has noticed that she is more self-contained. The change has revealed her, as a room is revealed by things being tidied up and put away. But her new air of completion is enigmatic in itself: now that he can see her, he finds himself wondering what she truly is.
‘All right?’ he says.
‘Ecstatic,’ she replies, huskily.
When they arrive Alexa leaps from the car and vanishes around the side of the house to the garden, from where they can hear the sound of children’s voices. Thomas and Tonie go the other way, to the front door, and ring the bell.
‘Those are nice,’ Tonie says. She touches the chipped stone urn brimming with geraniums that is standing on the doorstep in the autumn sun. She fingers their brash crimson heads. ‘Those are so typical.’
She is reflecting on Claudia, on her knack of careless homemaking that pleases Tonie in the same instant that it seems to make her mysteriously unhappy. Tonie’s methods are more purgative: she has fits of ruthless cleanliness in which the whole familiar surface of domestic life disappears, as though she were hoping to arrive at beauty by the route of annihilation. In Claudia’s house beauty is approached — no less assiduously, Thomas thinks — along the path of randomness. When Tonie comes here she wishes she could be more like Claudia, could be released from her own driving sense of order, could remember certain things and forget others, as Claudia has remembered to plant the geraniums and then forgotten them sufficiently to let them grow. Tonie fingers the geraniums as though they were things she in her madness would have been compelled to tidy away. Howard opens the door. He engulfs Tonie in his slab-like arms and his face appears over her shoulder, round and grinning like a Halloween pumpkin.
‘Come and see what we’ve got,’ he says.
He beckons them through the dark core of the house, towards the big open glass doors and the bright garden that stands beyond them. Thomas observes the sweat-stain on the back of his brother’s shirt, the redness of his balding scalp. In middle age Howard has become all surface. His emotions sweep over his large body like weather systems over a prairie. Outside, the children are running across the grass. There is a buzzing noise, incessant, like the sound of a lawnmower. As Thomas comes out, Howard’s son Lewis bursts from the greenery at the bottom of the garden, astride a tiny motorbike. He races the others up the lawn and when he reaches the end he turns and drives in a crazy circle around them, before collapsing on his side in the grass, wheels spinning, while they shriek with laughter.
Claudia is standing on the veranda, shielding her eyes from the sun.
‘Isn’t it awful?’ she says. ‘Howard just imported them from Japan.’
‘I’ve got five thousand of them sitting in a warehouse off the M25,’ Howard confirms, delightedly.
Thomas looks at the thing. He tries not to seem aloof, though it disgusts him, disappoints him, this latest proof of Howard’s indiscriminateness. By Christmas, a miniature electric motorbike will have made its inevitable way into the province of childhood desire. He feels, suddenly, that it is Howard’s fault, that he could stop it, if he chose to.
‘What does it run off?’
‘You charge them from a unit that feeds straight out of a domestic plug,’ Howard says. ‘They do twenty miles an hour on the flat.’
‘Can you imagine anything more repulsive?’ Claudia says. ‘The noise alone is enough to drive you out of your senses. And you won’t believe what they cost —’
‘Five hundred, online price,’ Howard says, nudging Thomas in the ribs.
‘You’d have to be sick,’ Claudia says. ‘Don’t you think?’
Tonie is standing with her hands on the rail, looking down at the lawn. She has put her dark glasses on again. Today she is dressed all in black, black trousers and shirt, a black leather jacket.
‘Oh, come on,’ she says, smiling. ‘It looks fun.’
Claudia draws to Tonie’s side, fingers the lapel of her jacket. She does not, Thomas thinks, like to be thought of as anti-fun.
‘Darling, you’re très rock today,’ she says, admiringly. ‘I felt sure you were a disapproving liberal, but now I can see how wrong I was.’
She herself wears old clogs, a poncho, flared corduroy trousers. When Howard met Claudia she was still a student at art college. It is part of the mythology of Claudia and Howard’s life that he carried her off before she could finish her degree. The myth makes it difficult to remember exactly what happened. Claudia has a painting studio at the bottom of the garden, a kind of memorial to her forsaken career. To Thomas her clothes are symbolic too, commemorative, like the uniforms veterans wear on Remembrance Day to remind people of their sacrifices.
‘I approve of everything now,’ Tonie says.
‘What a pleasing thought,’ Claudia says brightly. ‘I grow increasingly bitter. I’m turning to vinegar, like corked wine.’
‘Oh, darling,’ Howard says.
‘The thing is,’ she continues, ‘I just don’t want to believe people will buy them. I don’t want to believe they’re that stupid.’
Howard puts his arm around her, red-faced, smiling beatifically.
‘Let’s bloody hope they are,’ he says.
‘You see?’ Claudia says triumphantly, though it is unclear what they are meant to be seeing.
‘Well,’ Howard says reproachfully, ‘we’ve got to pay the mortgage somehow.’
‘If it were up to me,’ Claudia announces, ‘there wouldn’t be any mortgage.’
Howard looks bemused, as though, unlike everyone else, he has never heard Claudia say such things before. ‘Claude, it is up to you.’
Claudia sighs. ‘Why do we need all this? All this — establishment. Other people don’t need so much. Personally I’d be happy to make do with far less.’ Her gaze wanders over the bulky brick-coloured house, the expansive lawn, the trees in their autumn foliage, the numerous children. She appears to be deciding which parts of it she could dispense with. ‘All I really need is my studio. The way things are, I hardly go in there from one month to the next. I don’t have time.’