The Master Bedroom

by Tessa Hadley

  In the evenings, when the children were in bed, the family played solo whist around the rickety green baize card table (Betty’s parents would never have allowed cards). Suzie didn’t know how to play and wouldn’t learn; she sat in their grandfather’s big chair with her feet tucked under her, biting her hangnails and reading her book, some self-help thing. The old musty pungency of flagstones laid on an earth floor had survived the redecorating of the high plain rooms and the new furniture bought to make the place more comfortable, and still brought on Carol’s asthma; the tall clock still ticked although it wouldn’t keep the time. They had a log fire in the grate, because after the fine days the evenings were sharp. David wasn’t concentrating and lost two good solo hands. When the card players took a break for Betty to make hot drinks, Carol and Suzie went outside together to look at the sea. They leaned on the wall of the little stone quay; a fat gibbous moon, dark pearly white, hung low above the horizon; the black water breathed coldly in and out.

  Suzie pulled her cardigan tight around her shoulders. —Do you believe in life after death? she said out of nowhere.

  —Golly. Even when I was a Christian, I was never able to persuade myself. I could only believe in the ‘how to live’ bits of it, not the magic. I’m so boringly rational.

  —Were you a Christian? I suppose you were brought up as one.

  —For ages. Until I was thirteen or so, and fell in with wicked friends.

  —I’ve always been so solidly sure there wasn’t anything, it never seemed a problem. Now there are presences: I feel them, I’m sure I feel them.

  —Presences?

  —As if everything’s come alive. But not exactly in a benevolent way. Not evil either. Restless.

  —Oh, said Carol kindly, sorry that she couldn’t take this seriously: her own instincts were so exclusively earthly. —In the house here, it’s obvious that my grandparents are present in some sense, because we still have their things, it’s their place, we’re remembering them all the time while we’re here. But that’s all.

  —Not that. More active than that. Like a pressure: with messages. As if the way we live is all wrong, sealed up in ourselves: but underneath the skin of things, there’s a whole world of interconnections and meaning.

  —OK, that makes some sort of sense.

  —You think that the people who believe this stuff are all half daft and gullible, with crystals and tarot cards and things. But actually there are friends of mine, a new friend of mine from school, who really does seem to have some sort of gift, yet she doesn’t make any fuss about it. Quietly and calmly, she reads your mind. She takes away my headaches, just touching me on the temple. She talks about spirits as if they were the most ordinary thing, around us everywhere.

  —I don’t know if I’d be comfortable with that.

  —That’s what I would have thought too.

  Separated by their difference, vague to one another in the darkness, they stayed on, listening to the sea.

  —Don’t mention to David that we talked about this, Suzie said.

  —Of course not, if you don’t want me to.

  —He freezes up if I even try to talk to him about anything that isn’t just material and practical. I don’t mind him not believing in it. But he seems disgusted that anyone could ever think differently.

  —Oh dear, said Carol. —It’s true, I suppose, he can be a bit inflexible.

  David’s son came to Firenze twice before Kate could find time to talk to him. She had made up her mind, if she thought about him at all, that he wouldn’t turn up; and the first time when she opened the door to him – it was an awkward moment, she was on the phone to Max over some practicality to do with the appalling people renting her London flat (in her naivety she’d imagined that boring meant undemanding) – she half pretended she didn’t recognise him. He must have seen her crumple up carelessly in her hand the piece of paper he gave her with his mobile number, meaning to lose it. That had been a grey windless joyless day, she had been full with her idiotic troubles; the sight of Jamie, who was like David whom she was hoping for, but was not David, had seemed an exotically cruel turn of the knife. David had called twice more since he brought back the Polish book. He talked, she had drawn him out. Scrupulously coolly, she had held back any signs of what she felt, then suffered for it afterwards. What if he didn’t come again?

  When Jamie called the second time she was rehearsing with the quartet, so that she arrived at the door where he stood with his bike – in sunshine this time – with her violin in her hand and a carelessly expectant sociability, thinking he was going to be the clarinettist who wanted to play with them. Behind her trailed impatient ends of music and laughing voices (dark note from the lugubrious cello). Jamie peered past her shoulder, longing visibly to be asked inside; Kate saw that he was calling now because he was curious about her, as well as interested in his mother. She said that she couldn’t talk to him that afternoon, but that she would meet him the week following, in the café where she’d first seen him. She almost forgot the appointment but didn’t quite; and what’s more, she arranged to pay the Buckets and Mops lady, whose name was Alison, to stay an extra hour and sit with Billie, because Billie in the café took up all her attention, and if she was to do her duty by the boy then she ought to concentrate – at least for this short half an hour, after all this time – on Francesca.

  The park, on her way to meet him, displayed all the delicate first dazzle of spring: fresh yellow-green leaves the crumpled limp texture of kid shaken out of the hoary old branches; red slips of new growth sprouting on grizzled standard roses. The first rowing boats of the new season were out on the lake. The great magnolia that shaded the herbaceous border was fat with waxy buds still tightly pink; later, they would open to cream. Kate remembered as she walked her old rage at Francesca, who had been so tall, so indifferent, so English; now the poor old dead had faded and gone out of fashion whether they liked it or not. She had chosen carefully clothes appropriate to the meeting with Francesca’s son: a green dress, slightly Audrey Hepburn; her cream jacket with the big jet buttons; sunglasses. She was late, of course, and the boy had probably already decided she wasn’t coming, although she admired him for sitting absorbed nonetheless in his thoughts and not giving away any signs of the shame of being forgotten: at his age Kate would have been agonised, and long gone. He had his mother’s full loose lower lip, which Kate had forgotten until she saw him. It made their smiles slippery and equivocal.

  —Remind me what you’re going to do at university?

  —I’ve had a new idea. Anthropology. I’ve contacted a couple of places.

  —That’s what I’d do if I got to choose over again.

  —It’s really good of you to come; you’re probably very busy. What do you do? I mean: what’s your job? Are you a musician?

  —I gave up my job. Didn’t your father tell you?

  —He’s never spoken to me about you.

  Kate took that in without the coffee even quivering in the cup in her hand. She would have hated to think that David carelessly dropped scraps of information about her for his indifferent wife, in front of the children.

  —Until this year I taught in the Slavic Studies department at Queen Mary. I worked on translations of Aksanov and Chekhov stories. Then I was bored with the academic life; anyway, my mother is ancient and dotty, and I was able to pretend I had to look after her. I took against the metropolis with all its uncomfortable excitements; I decided I would come home to Wales. I told myself that all the hidden poetry of life was in the in-between-sized cities where you can walk home from the theatre in the evening, and everywhere you go you meet the same crowd of people.

  —And is it OK?

  —It’s almost too much: childhood, youth, the past. I was safer in London where my life ran shallowly. I may have made a terrible mistake.

  —But you can always get away again. Apart from your mother of course.

  —Oh, she’ll live for ever! Then Kate put down her cup in its saucer
with an apologetic sigh. —That wasn’t tactful, was it? Considering what we’re here to talk about.

  —I don’t mind about my mother being dead. I can’t really remember anything else.

  —In future the therapists will drag it all out.

  —Was she like you are?

  —Don’t tell me that’s why you’ve wanted to see me? Because you think I’m like your mother? I can’t tell you how much Francesca would have hated to be compared to me! She was to begin with – you must know this – tall and rather beautiful. A princess.

  —I’ve seen photographs, of course.

  —The photographs don’t do her justice; she looks awkward, because she was self-conscious, whereas in real life she flowed. That was her grace, the flowing deliberate way she did things. In those days I was a radical feminist, or so I thought; Francesca was bored by the politics everyone else was going mad over, she wrote poetry. Do you have her poems? She had things apparently in the TLS: that was later. I don’t know whether they were any good.

  —I didn’t know she wrote poems.

  —You have her mouth, by the way.

  —My grandmother says that.

  —It’s very subtle; it changes everything straightforward you have from your father.

  —Did you like her?

  —I admired her. She was Carol’s friend really. They lived together in the second year, in an amazing flat in Kensington, with marble fireplaces and bits of the ceiling fallen in, like a ruined palace. Francesca used to hold court in party dresses she bought from the junk shops. Carol and she were always falling out.

  —Carol never told me that.

  Kate was penitent. —I’m remembering, you know, an irresponsible time. We were none of us very kind: we were too clever, in competition to be the cleverest, struggling to block out some sort of shape of adult life for ourselves. Carol was always the kindest. We were all sad, as you are when you’re young. We all went to bed for days at a time with misery, and mostly it came more or less all right afterwards. We didn’t die, anyway. I don’t know why Francesca did what she did later. I lost touch with her, I only saw her once, twice, in the years after she married your father, and had you.

  —Why did she used to fall out with Carol?

  —Carol’s so reasonable. Francesca would make a fuss about ordering something special in a café, then leave most of it on her plate. She claimed to be allergic to all sorts of things: tea, cats, soap, God knows what. She had favouritisms and then she dropped people, and Carol had to lie to fend them off, pretend at the front door that she wasn’t in when they could hear her laughing upstairs. But then all that was also just what Carol liked. You know, stout and watertight and sensible is drawn to fragile, flawed, pretty as hell.

  —I suppose so.

  —I’ve been too frank, haven’t I?

  —It’s what I wanted to know. I’m interested.

  —Was that your girlfriend: the pretty dark one? In here with you that day?

  —Not really, Jamie said; not at all brutally, but as if it was an effort for a moment to remember who she was talking about.

  —Poor thing. ‘Not really.’ If she could hear you: wouldn’t it break her heart?

  He was surprised. —I don’t think it’s like that between us, honestly.

  Talking about the old days at UCL made Kate anything but nostalgic; actually, despite what everybody said about youth, most of her past made her shudder in sheer disgust, and relief that she didn’t have to live it over again.

  Kate and David left his car in Park Place and were chased by a sudden shower into the foyer of the Reardon Smith, behind the museum; she held her umbrella up over both of them, he stooped his head, and of necessity as they dashed she gripped his arm. It was exactly the kind of intimate manoeuvre she’d never been able to manage with Max, who was six foot four and had to have an umbrella of his own. Inside David bought tickets for the recital while she shook the rain off the umbrella, then he stood back to let her go first through the door into the gorgeous little 1920s lecture theatre, all subdued polished wood and white pillars and red plush, where the BBC Radio 3 man was already mumbling to himself and his listeners in his upstairs corner. They were hardly damp; Kate took off her jacket anyway, and put her hand on David’s sleeve, to make sure. David held out the programme for them both to read. They were falling into a pattern of friendship that had been before Kate came back to live in Cardiff exactly her idea of the sort of thing that would evolve in a place like this, between grown-up cultured people. He picked her up at the house and they went to concerts together; he called in on her unannounced to talk about books, on his way home from work, or at weekends. (He had told her when he was halfway through Madame Bovary that he was interested in the medical stuff but that Emma irritated him; he thought she deserved, for her petty selfishness and credulity, all the disappointment and doom that he sensed was coming.)

  They glanced at each other with eyebrows raised when some people clapped in the wrong place. After the slow movement in the Schubert E flat trio, which for God’s sake she had heard a thousand thousand times and even played, Kate found she had tears spilling out of her eyes and running down her cheeks, and had to fumble surreptitiously in her bag for a tissue to wipe them away, hoping her nose wouldn’t be red; as they filed out with the rest of the audience to have their free coffee in the museum, he held her lightly by the top of her arm, possibly simply holding her back to let somebody past, but also possibly out of comradely recognition of her emotion. All this was very poignant. But even Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, Kate thought, wasn’t satisfied with just this; and that was before 1968. I’ll die, she thought, if more doesn’t happen. They didn’t wait with the crowd in the museum restaurant downstairs but went up to the nicer place you could get coffee in the pillared airy foyer under the dome.

  David met people he knew; he introduced Kate – without, of course, any shadow of a hesitation – and stood talking with them, his mac over his arm, while she went to queue at the counter behind the little tables; to claim their free coffee she had to signal to him for their concert tickets in his pocket. She had never felt so domesticated; she was pleased with the chance to watch David as his public, responsible self: straight-backed, watchful, courteous. She had been in London for a few days, seeing people and arranging for some new translation work; from there this pleasantly genial, drearily dressed crowd might look like nobody worth knowing. But these were real people, getting on with substantial things, guarding their privacy as if it was worth something. At least everyone wasn’t glancing around for something better happening somewhere else. David knew a man who taught music at the university (they had been at school together); Kate in her shallowness would not have given his meek beard and Marks & Spencer trousers, worn too short, a second glance. Talking with his friend – about music, of course, not gossip – David was animated and forgot where he was; she saw the hawk-flash of his authority from under the heavy lids he hid behind. He was tanned from his seaside holiday in west Wales.

  They sat down at a table under a huge Frank Brangwyn oil painting of the trenches in the First World War: their awareness in the midst of chatting snagged occasionally on some bloody horror.

  —So tell me, she said, hanging her jacket on the back of her chair, giving him her smiling attention, —what have you been doing at work since you got back?

  David smiled warily. —You wouldn’t be interested.

  —No: go on, I really am.

  —I’ve been revising our immunisation guide for parents in line with new policy, and trying to get on with this report on the funding implications of the reorganisation.

  —That all sounds so . . . solid. What are the funding implications?

  He laughed. —Even I’m bored by the idea of going into that. Why don’t you tell me how you got on? Are they keen on your idea for this new translation?

  Kate put on a face of despair and gave an exaggerated account of the struggle she’d had to persuade them to be interested. —Who
wants to read the Russians nowadays? she said gloomily. —In the Cold War it was all so glamorous, everyone loves a bit of suffering under totalitarian oppression. Now we’re sick of it, the eternal moaning and groaning. What’s the matter with them? Why can’t they just get on with it like everybody else?

  —I can see why you’re drawn to Russia, he said. — There’s so much depth to the culture.

  She shuddered. —Depths to drown in. The place terrifies me. My family aren’t from Russia, you know. From Lithuania; quite another thing. My grandparents spoke Polish and Yiddish.

  Kate wondered if Jamie had told David that they had met and talked about Francesca; it seemed likely that the boy would keep it as his secret. She didn’t know what David’s reaction might be to her having discussed his dead wife with their son; anyway, she didn’t want David’s family, any of them, tangled in the talk between them, binding them fatally in a pattern of friendly above-board intercourse which would end in her being invited round to their place every year for Christmas drinks. She didn’t know whether David told Suzie that they were going to these concerts together, or told her how often he was calling in at Firenze; he had definitely phoned Kate from work, not from home, to ask if she wanted to come with him to the Reardon Smith. Sometimes when she was with him, instead of feeling happy, she was filled with the sensation of having made a terrible mistake, not in falling for David, but in how she had lived her whole life before it happened, all her efforts not to be banal. The right way to live, the good way, had been invisible to her: now she was locked out of it, peering in through its windows. She set David tests, to find out what he thought their relationship was: today she thought perhaps something would show up when he drove her home after the concert, where Carol was sitting with Billie. (Carol was a brick, she had moved into Firenze while Kate was away.)