The Master Bedroom

by Tessa Hadley

  When it was over and the audience were making their way out, David found himself waiting, while people pushed past, for Kate to catch up with him. Wrapped in some sort of dark shawl embroidered with flowers, thrown back over one shoulder, she was looking carefully for the steps under her feet; but her expression was rapt, she was still absorbed in the music.

  —Kate! Kate Flynn!

  The urgency with which he hailed her might have surprised her; they had never been intimate, in fact, they’d never in their adult selves completely outgrown that arrangement in which he was her friend’s kid brother, to be tolerated. She seemed pleased enough to see him.

  —David!

  She stopped and put out both her hands, causing a hiatus in the flow of people; he took them with a warmth he hadn’t known he felt. She did still have that white lock, swept back from her narrow intellectual-looking face with its finely emphatic nose and slanting black eyes.

  —Are you here with Carol? I know she comes with you.

  He shook his head. —Alone.

  —Shame. I haven’t seen Carol in a while. I’m alone too. I had a ticket for my mother but she changed her mind.

  —Perhaps we could have a drink?

  She gave him a quickly reassessing look. —Here?

  —If you like, here. The bar’s open downstairs, isn’t it? Or anywhere.

  —Why not? We could catch up.

  David was all of a sudden reckless, as if Suzie’s leaving him scalding with justified indignation had handed him a new freedom to go after what he wanted. He wanted a friend; he was imagining a companionship like cool air, a mingling of intelligences. He had been afraid of Kate’s intelligence once. She had seemed sophisticated and sarcastic when he was a studious tongue-tied boy studying sciences at school.

  —Why don’t you come back to the house? Kate said as they made their way downstairs in the press of people. —I ought really to check on my mother, although I hope she’s asleep in bed. I’ve got a bottle of Glenmorangie that needs drinking.

  —The house being?

  —The old house. The same old place. I’ve come back to live: didn’t Carol tell you?

  —She might have mentioned it: but I didn’t take in that it was permanent. I know your mother hasn’t been well.

  —Her health is fine, only she’s losing her marbles. After I’d got her dressed up in all her finery this evening she suddenly made her mind up there was something on the television she had to watch. Something she’d seen the first part of and couldn’t bear to miss finding out what happened. I looked in the Radio Times and there wasn’t anything, of course, but she wouldn’t be persuaded.

  —I’m sorry, David said. —I always liked your mother.

  —You will still like her. She’s awfully charming even in her disarray. But she’ll be in bed when we get there, I hope.

  They shared a taxi to Kate’s old home beside the lake. David expected his pleasure in having made his bold gesture of friendship to subside, but it didn’t. He had only been to the house a few times, in his youth, but he remembered everything vividly; when Kate opened the door with her key and led him through the imitation-baronial hall into the long drawing room, he saw that it had hardly changed. It had been the grandest house he knew; he had thought of it when he was a boy, with a mixture of awe and unease, almost as a palace, with its tower and its long verandas at front and back, and its stained glass. The decoration in the drawing room had been old-fashioned even in the seventies: some kind of light silvery wallpaper, a chandelier, watercolours and still lifes hanging from the picture rail, a baby grand piano, huge stuffed armchairs, dainty occasional tables. The paper was shabby now, there were brown damp stains in one corner, and the carpet had faded to blankness; the armchairs sagged with broken springs and on their arms the faded silk was worn away, so that their stuffing leaked. But it was all still somehow gracious. A young Kate in her graduation gown, plainer than she was now and wearing glasses, gazed from the mantelpiece in a silver frame.

  Even when he was a boy David had understood that the Flynns were unfashionable because they had their minds set on higher standards of good taste. Kate’s father was already dead then, he had been some kind of musician; Kate was the only child. Her mother was Jewish. There must have been money at some point, to buy this big house; he couldn’t remember that Mrs Flynn had ever worked, apart from giving a few piano lessons. Here and there around the room were incongruous contemporary things that Kate must have brought with her when she came home: a bright-coloured pot full of pens and pencils, a poster advertising a photography exhibition at the ICA, bright striped silk cushions, a pink-and-yellow blanket thrown over the back of the sofa, signs of the different life Kate must have in London.

  She carried in the Glenmorangie and two glasses, also a pot of coffee ready to plunge. David never usually drank coffee in the evening, but he didn’t care tonight if he was kept awake.

  —So what did you think of Jephtha? she asked.

  —I thought it was excellent.

  —It was. But the staging irritated me.

  He didn’t want her to demur. He never cared, anyway, how the designer chose to dress things up, he took no notice of that. He hoped Kate wasn’t going to fuss about it.

  —All that Italian neo-realist bit, headscarves and Mussolini suits. They see that it’s about authority and patriarchy, and then the ideas bulb pops on: oh, it’s just like Fascist Italy. Wasn’t that annoying?

  —It didn’t bother me, he said coolly, warning her off. —Music isn’t ‘about’ things. Personally, I’d rather hear it sung as a concert.

  She was a university lecturer; no doubt they got into the habit of holding forth, thinking they knew everything. Perhaps she would be tiresome after all. To his surprise she fished in her bag for cigarettes and a lighter; there was hardly anyone in his acquaintance these days who still smoked. She didn’t ask him if he minded; slipping off her shoes and tucking her feet under her, she curled up in one of the big old armchairs, contemplating him sitting in the opposite chair through the cloud of her smoke. The black cat that had followed her into the room jumped into her lap. There was something familiar in the way Kate smiled at David, as if she knew things about him he didn’t know about himself; it must come from when they were teenagers, and he was such an innocent, without a clue as to what you were supposed to do and say with girls.

  He wanted to change the subject. —If you’ve moved to live down here, does that mean you’ve given up your job in London? Are you working here?

  —I’ve given up full stop. I’m not working.

  —Not working at all?

  —Isn’t it amazing? Billie gets a care allowance, I’m renting out my London flat. We seem to manage. I live like an aristocrat. Lying in bed late, reading all day, going to concerts and the cinema, visiting friends. We watch all the detective programmes on television. I think I ought to take up cards. What do the leisured classes play in the old novels? Bezique? Piquet? Vingt-et-un? No doubt it all seems very dissipated, to a man with serious responsibilities.

  —It’s a big sacrifice to make, to look after your mother.

  —I’m not the sacrificing kind. I really didn’t do it out of goodness. I was curious. Is there anything left inside, after twenty years? Anyway, nobody cares any more: the students, the administration. I was bored with everything about academic life that had enchanted me at first. The obedient processing of the latest fad. I’m too old for it.

  —Is that really all you think it is?

  —Don’t take me too seriously. I don’t know what I think. Anyway, now I’m so happy, doing nothing. Of course it’s early days. I may yet end up gibbering on the street, or murdering Billie in a moment of overweening rage. Or begging for my job back. I did leave that option open. I managed to arrange a year’s unpaid leave.

  —You’re not secretly scribbling? We’re not to expect the publication of some great work of fiction one of these days?

  She looked disappointed in him. —Oh no, she said.
—Why does everyone think that? That’s the last thing. Perhaps if you haven’t had children they think you ought to give birth to novels instead.

  Kate didn’t know whether David Roberts could remember a little scene that had gone on between them in this house, years and years ago, when they were young and she’d made an awful fool of herself; she didn’t care whether he could or not. He looked so imperturbable, sitting perched on the edge of his chair in his suit and tie, with his knees apart, twirling his drink and looking into his glass as if he never would unbend, frowning his disapproval of her thoughts on the oratorio. She would have quite liked to make him blush. The thing had happened at one of her teenage parties; she had had the best, the wildest parties (Billie had been so persuadable, usually she agreed to stay away for the night). David must have tagged along with Carol. The idea of those parties generally was that by the end of the evening the crowd of individuals was resolved to a number of interlocked couples in a darkened room. They had had the folding doors pushed open to make this room and the library into one; Kate had been lying on the old chaise longue, she had patted a space for David to sit down beside her. Perhaps if the doors hadn’t been closed now, the sight of the chaise longue would have reminded him.

  For Kate and Carol in those days David had only been an earnest little brother who could never be coaxed into trouble: he was still a child, with doubting eyes and a sober careful mouth. Experimentally, when he sat down she’d taken his hand – a boy’s brown hand, with bitten nails, fingers stained with biro ink – and put it inside her blouse. She’d been wearing a wraparound crêpe top, a black print with gypsy flowers, and no bra underneath; she had expected David to be astonished and grateful, immediately in her thrall. David instead had snatched back his hand as if she had burned it, and jumped up from the sofa with an expression of absolute disgust, then gone to find Carol and let her know he was going home. Kate had told herself at the time that he must have been terrified – they used to say sagely that some boys were ‘terrified’ of sex – but she had known it wasn’t that. And although a thousand worse things than this little humiliation had happened to Kate since – infinitely worse things – she had held a grudge against David Roberts all the same, and thought him rather a bore, even in all the years afterwards when she met him sometimes at Carol’s. She had only finally forgiven him tonight, when he called out her name in the Millennium Centre, and his pleasure at seeing her shone so transparently in his face.

  He wasn’t anything like Carol. They came from an old non conforming Cardiff family, which once had owned a steelworks; Carol had showed her the Unitarian chapel whose foundation stone was laid by a great-great-grandmother of theirs. Carol was dauntless and crusading; David seemed stolid and cautious beside her. He had trained as a doctor, and been a GP for a while; now Kate thought he did something in Public Health. His tight dark hair surprised her, growing crisp and close to his head; when he was a boy it had been silky and straight (everyone in those days had worn their hair long, even the science students). Its bristling tightness now seemed a manifestation of the effort with which he held himself back. He had lived, of course, through dreadful things. Kate had known Francesca, they had been at university together; Carol and Francesca had shared a flat at one point, before Francesca ever knew David.

  —Do you know my wife? David asked her, and she startled, before she understood that of course he meant the present one, the one Kate had last seen weeping at the side of the motorway after that extraordinary thing with the swan; she had thought once or twice since, with curiosity, about the blonde farouche girl whose beauty had only gleamed out like an accident in the great luck of her escape. Kate had an instinct not to tell David how she and his wife were mysteriously linked; anyway, she wouldn’t be able to explain why she hadn’t made herself known at the roadside.

  —I’ve met her, she said pleasantly, —at Carol’s. But I’ve forgotten her name.

  David gazed, burdened, into his Glenmorangie.

  —Actually, Suzie was there with me tonight, at the oratorio. But she hated it, she left after the second interval. She doesn’t really enjoy music.

  While David and Kate were talking there came the sound of slow steps on the stairs, and then Mrs Flynn walked into the room. She was tiny like Kate, and had the same sculpted head with its drama of cheekbones, tautly curving nose and eloquent eyes; perhaps because she had no chin her expression was bland and sweet where Kate’s was decisive. David was shocked at how Mrs Flynn’s shoulders were bowed and her hair was pure white; she stepped with brittle stiffness as if she was afraid of falling. His own mother hadn’t come anywhere near this phase of ageing; she was still brisk and busy with her voluntary work. Perhaps Mrs Flynn had always been older than the other mothers; perhaps she wasn’t young when she had Kate. He had prepared, when he heard her coming downstairs, to see her in nightclothes or a dressing gown; but she was dressed up in a flowered skirt and pink cardigan, with white button earrings, as if she was going somewhere. Her white hair was neatly pinned up behind.

  —I heard you had visitors, Kate. She held out her hand, smiling.

  David stood up to explain himself; her hand in his was impossibly light, a scatter of bird-bones loose in their pouch of skin. —My sister Carol is an old friend of Kate’s.

  —How nice, dear, she said. —I do know Carol.

  —Billie, said Kate. —What are you doing? You were all nicely tucked up in bed when I looked in. Whatever have you put your clothes on for? It’s the middle of the night.

  Mrs Flynn was unrepentant. —Is it really? she smiled. —I thought it was morning. I didn’t want to waste the lovely day.

  —It’s late, Mummy. It’s night.

  —I don’t often get the opportunity to listen in while you young ones talk.

  —You see how mad she really is? said Kate. —She still thinks I’m one of the young ones.

  Mrs Flynn made a comical face at David, sticking out her lower lip in a pout. —Why should I miss all the fun? And of course music. This is a great house for music. Music and books. Are you a reader? I’ve been lucky enough to be surrounded with art and beauty, all my life.

  She lowered herself, clinging to the arm with her two hands, onto the end of the sofa, where she sat stiffly graceful, smiling from one to the other.

  —David’s a doctor, Billie.

  —Well, that’s fascinating, isn’t it?

  —I’m a Consultant in Public Health. Communicable diseases. Don’t get me started on how fascinating: I love my work. But I should read more. Sometimes the only reading I find time to do is Thomas the Tank Engine to my son.

  —I hate that ‘should’ of dreary obligation.

  —We have so many books, Mrs Flynn sighed.

  —Where are your books? David asked, looking around. —I remembered books, but they aren’t in here.

  —We have quite a library, next door. Would you like to see? Please borrow something. Please use it as your own.

  —I expect, Kate said, —he thinks books are frivolous, in the face of the kind of work he does. Explosions, epidemics, disasters.

  —Why don’t you lend me something? David said. — Poetry or a novel. If you lend me something interesting I’ll try. It would be good for me.

  —Anyway, isn’t your son too old for Thomas the Tank Engine? He’s surely in secondary school by now?

  —You’re thinking of Jamie, David said. —Jamie’s seventeen. I have a younger son who’s only six.

  —Seventeen? Oh, that’s shocking. He can’t be seventeen: it seems like yesterday. What is he like, Francesca’s son?

  David for a moment didn’t answer her: for some reason he didn’t want Kate to know that Jamie was more like her than he was: clever and sceptical and difficult, a voracious reader.

  —He’s a great cyclist, he said. —Out at all hours on his bike.

  After David Roberts had gone, Billie was supposed to be putting the kettle on for cocoa (she would have difficulty getting back to sleep after the stimulation
of a visitor), but she had found her spectacles instead and was sitting looking competent at the table in the kitchen, going through an old pile of leaflets and pointless mail.

  —What are you doing? Kate wailed. —That’s all been sorted! It’s for recycling.

  —I just thought there might be post that needed dealing with.

  —Fat chance, if there was, of your dealing with any of it. Anyway, it’s bedtime.

  Obediently, Billie put down the free sample of fabric softener. —Do you think that this stuff’s any good?

  —For Christ’s sake. I can’t forgive you for coming downstairs when I bring my friends in. What kind of social life am I supposed to have? What kind of sex life, for that matter?

  —He’s a very nice young man, isn’t he? How do we know him?

  Kate had always spoken to her mother sharply. When she was a child she’d hit her too, and bitten her: Billie had talked about her temper as if it was a force of nature, magnificent and inevitable, which had made Kate ashamed. When Kate was older, she and her mother had had grand shouting matches; they had also told each other everything. In truth, the quarrelling hadn’t got any worse since Billie had been ill. But Kate knew other people would be shocked that she swore at her mother and raised her voice. She was occasionally shocked at it herself. Sometimes she pushed at her mother in exasperation, she smacked her legs when she was trying to help her get her shoes on.

  Filling her mother’s hot-water bottle, she reflected grimly that David Roberts tonight would have taken away a charming impression of both of them, the eccentric pair in the house of culture and music. He had insisted on borrowing a book, so in the end she snatched up something from one of the piles on a table and pushed it at him, to get rid of him: something in a green binding, God knows what, probably some collection of poems in Polish.

  Three

  IN LATE MARCH, when it was supposed to be spring, there was a fall of snow. Kate opened the back door last thing at night and Sim ran high-stepping into the kitchen, affronted, with spots of it on his fur; the next morning all the flowerpots in the garden, empty for years, wore white caps. It didn’t last even twenty-four hours. The sun shone weakly and the air was busy all day with a persistent ticking of melt water; on the roof the softening snow slid about. Big drops plummeted past the windows while Kate rehearsed Schubert in the drawing room with the quartet she’d managed to get together. Even the birds’ cheeping sounded liquified.