Free The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk

discussing. Tonie sits in the back seat, her hands folded in her lap. They are parked in the darkness of an empty street in an industrial-looking area, full of warehouses and unmarked modern buildings with their metal shutters down. The wind makes a plaintive sound as it comes off the sea. The rain spatters against the glass. The rough black water frets at the concrete esplanade. The driver comes back and they set off again slowly. They turn a corner and after a hundred yards or so they creep into the darkness at the side of the road and stop. The driver points. Tonie sees a big, gloomy factory building behind a wall. Suddenly she is exasperated.
    ‘That isn’t a hotel,’ she says. ‘That doesn’t look like a hotel.’
    ‘Yes, hotel!’
    The driver points again. He is insistent. He is as full of certitude as a minute ago he was riven by doubt. He is capable, she sees, of leaving her here whether it is a hotel or not. A feeling of disenchantment passes over her, the feeling that she has been let down not by what she knows and trusts but by what is new and unfamiliar. She stays where she is on the back seat. She has always been susceptible to ill treatment: she becomes pliant, victimised. It is the driver’s masculinity that paralyses her. She is unable to deliver herself from it. He must release her, as a fisherman roughly releases a fish from his hook. Suddenly she sees people, three or four figures pulling suitcases up the front steps through the gloom to the building’s entrance. The big anonymous door opens and closes again behind them, showing a segment of orange light. The driver exclaims. He is happy. He springs from his seat and opens the car door for her. He gestures again towards the dimly lit entrance, lest she remain in any doubt. She gives him his money. She realises that he wouldn’t have abandoned her after all.
    *
    In her room she sits on the bed and goes through her notes. The room is big and bare and brightly lit, white like a gallery. The wind moans at the windows. The tall white shutters move and knock. She peers through the slats and sees again the flat black distances streaming with rain, the shapes of cranes and beyond them the darkness boiling indistinctly on the low horizon. It seems to be advancing on her across the desolation, to be bent on prising her out. But the room has a force of its own, with its enormous immaculate bareness, its strange long clusters of pendant lights, its futuristic untouched furniture. On the table there is a giant block of glass – a vase – with a sheaf of orchids and blood-coloured gladioli in it. The flowers are odourless, three feet tall with thick, poison-green stalks. They look synthetic, but when she touches them she finds that they are real.
    Tonie is here to speak at a conference. The conference is tomorrow at ten o’clock; after that she will fly home. She forgot, when she left the house this morning, that she would be returning so soon. It was the rift, the departure, that concerned her, as the hurdle concerns the jumper, not the same continuous earth that lies on the other side of it. She remembers that Alexa was wearing a red dress when she stood at the door to say goodbye. Tonie had never seen the dress before: Thomas bought it for her. It made Alexa seem unreal, like a girl in a dream. In it, she seemed to have no further need of Tonie, except to be numbered among her accomplishments. Yet the mark of possession was Thomas’s: in the red dress Alexa was hallmarked, like a silver figurine. This, it struck Tonie, was what someone looked like who was taken care of by Thomas. In a sense it was what Tonie herself ought to look like. When she looked at Alexa she was looking at a version of her relationship with Thomas, at one of several possibilities, in which she was his cherished object, decked out in a dress he had chosen himself.
    There is a restaurant downstairs. Tonie prepares herself in front of the mirror, trying on a different shirt. Who is she?