The Master Bedroom

by Tessa Hadley

  In the event, when David had stopped the car he looked at his watch and sighed: he didn’t even have time to come inside. He asked Kate to give his apologies to Carol: he and Suzie were taking the children out to lunch with friends. He was always failing Kate’s tests: on the other hand, he never failed them quite catastrophically enough, so that Kate could always excuse him (he sighed, after all, when he looked at his watch). She had told Max all about him when she was in London: how she didn’t know whether he was shy and conventional, or simply unmoved. She had managed to prise Max away for at least one lunchtime from Sherie. For all his generous interest, Max had still seemed to feel some pain at the idea of her passion for someone else: Kate when she noticed it was sorry, and changed the subject. She had kissed him when they parted: he had had to stoop down for her to do it, from such a thin, blond height.

  The Citroën was making alarming noises, and the cellist in his disappointed way offered to take Kate in his car to the big Tesco supermarket on Western Avenue, because he needed some shopping himself. She couldn’t afford to turn down such an opportunity, although she wanted nothing less than to know the contents of his lonely supermarket basket. The bits of shopping they had to do were dwarfed by the booming gigantism of the place: it was for oversized families, trolleys heaped high with spoils, a couple of dresses or a pair of shoes or a plasma television topping off the bumper packs of oven chips and the seventeen varieties of French cheese. Defiantly, so that her basket wouldn’t look anything like the cellist’s, she filled it with flowers and fizzy wine and chocolates for Billie, who would be delighted. Actually it turned out that the cellist was a bit of a gourmet, buying duck-liver pâté and bottles of green peppercorns and walnut oil.

  Then she met Suzie Roberts in the poultry aisle. Kate saw Suzie first, but too late to pretend she hadn’t and hurry away. Suzie was bending over the organic chickens, the little yellow free-range corn-fed ones that had had happy lives. She was wearing cut-off pink jeans and a short white cotton vest that showed her freckled tanned belly; Kate imagined they were both shivering and goose-fleshed in the emanations from the chill cabinet. Suzie wasn’t wearing any make-up. The children were beautiful: the girl with David’s deep eyelids and conker-brown hair chopped off at her shoulders, swinging like corn-silk; the little boy with his mother’s fairness and white lashes. The girl daydreamed, pivoting on one foot, and the boy attended conscientiously to his mother’s choosing: this chicken or that one? Suzie let the boy decide; solemnly he pointed out his favourite with a finger, and then checked quickly against his mother’s expression, to see if he’d done well. Suzie squeezed his shoulders and pressed her cheek against his, sun-flushed flawed adult skin against his perfect childish creaminess. From where she crouched down slightly to her little son, she looked up and saw Kate watching beside the turkey portions.

  Of course there wasn’t anything between Suzie and Kate: nothing had happened, except in Kate’s thoughts, that might not have been shown to the world in broad daylight. But it was possible that Suzie knew that David her husband phoned Kate from work sometimes (although nothing could have been more innocent than those short businesslike calls); and she surely knew they had been to concerts together. David’s daughter lifted her dreaming lids and inspected Kate frankly. It was too late not to say anything.

  —Kate Flynn, isn’t it? Do you remember we met at Carol’s? I’m David’s wife.

  Kate had forgotten Suzie’s voice: husky and steady, with traces of an accent, not Welsh, more Essex. Suzie didn’t put out her hand to shake, but tightened it on the boy, and even touched the girl’s shoulder lightly with her other hand, as if she presented them as a collective.

  —Of course I remember, Kate said. —I’m surprised we haven’t bumped into one another before. I’ve moved back here to look after my mother.

  —Yes, I heard. How is she?

  —Doing very well, thank you.

  —David said you’re both music-lovers.

  —My mother and I?

  —You and him.

  —Oh well, we both come from musical families. Doesn’t Bryn Roberts sing? He looks as if he ought to sing. I believe my mother taught David piano once – I mean long long ago, in the Stone Age. Or was that Carol?

  —It’s nice, that he has someone to go to the concerts with. I expect he told you that I’m no good at his kind of music.

  —I suppose with children it’s hard to get babysitters.

  —We’ve got Jamie, Suzie said. —My stepson.

  —Of course, said Kate. —I’d forgotten about him.

  They managed to move past one another, smiling and pretending they were in a hurry. Hardly noticing whether she put anything useful in her basket, Kate hurried to find the cellist and make him take her home; but he was only halfway through his list, and fussily determined to get every ingredient for some fancy dish he was cooking up to eat all by himself. In every aisle Kate walked down while she waited for him, she seemed to meet Suzie and her children walking up, so that they had to acknowledge one another.

  At home Kate unpacked the shopping carefully. She made Billie a sandwich and coffee, gave her the chocolates, put the television on, put the flowers in the sink, and then said she needed to lie down for half an hour. Billie turned on her a bland, chewing, acquiescent face, then went back to the advertisements. Half an hour or three hours, she wouldn’t notice; all the clocks in the house had been left to run down long before Kate came home, the ones that wanted winding and the ones that wanted batteries; only Kate’s watch now ever showed the real time. She retreated to her bedroom and lit a cigarette, pulling the curtains shut across the day that was anyway muffled with grey cloud against any sign of the sun. She kicked off her shoes and lay on her bed, smoking and giving herself up to hollowness, staring at the Pied Piper in the nursery frieze who loomed with his jaunty uplifted beckoning trumpet through the purple paint, in such promise of adventure and pleasure. How could she have imagined for one moment that she mattered except as an occasional Sunday-morning friend to this David whose other life was so actual, so unalterably good-looking, so substantially made flesh? She must have thought he was a man with a paper life to screw up and throw away, like some of the people she knew in London. She had screwed up her own professional life as if it didn’t matter, and stepped outside it into where she was no one.

  Five

  DAVID ARRIVED HOME from work one evening to find a two-man mountain tent, orange, in the back garden. Suzie got up from where she was kneeling to hammer in tent pegs, wiping her hands on her jeans, smiling in a way that was somehow strained and challenging.

  —I borrowed it from Giulia’s girls, she said. —What do you think?

  —It’s all right. Holes in the lawn. What’s it for?

  —I thought I might take the kids camping: if the weather’s fine. With Neil and Menna; they go away nearly every weekend. I had to make sure I knew how to put it up. It’s years since I had a tent.

  —You seem to have managed OK.

  —Actually Jamie had to come down and rescue me.

  David didn’t in the least want to go camping: the idea of its play-inconveniences had never appealed to him, he wasn’t the type renewed by close contact with the earth. He was taken aback nonetheless by Suzie’s presumption that he wouldn’t come.

  —I know you’ve got work to do, she said, conciliatory. —I thought we could leave you to get on with it in peace.

  The children were in ecstasy over the tent. They wanted to sleep in it that night, in the garden; Suzie said that they could if Jamie would stay out with them. Hannah zipped up the front and sat inside in the hot orange light with her phone, telling her friends about it; Joel brought down his Beanie Babies. But Jamie had disappeared with his bike, and he didn’t come back. Avoiding David’s eye apologetically, Suzie fetched her pyjamas from under the pillow in their bedroom; they all three undressed and got into their sleeping bags while it was still light enough for them to see. David worked in his study and then watched Newsni
ght; every so often he was surprised by the looming outside the window of the tent’s alien faint fluorescence, and remembered his breathing, dreaming family afloat in it. He heard Jamie come home late; they met once in the kitchen, where David was getting a glass of water and Jamie was shovelling in his usual overflowing night-time bowl of cereal head down, hair falling in his face, book propped inches in front of him on the table to keep conversation out. David supposed that his son was revising for his exams, which began in a couple of weeks, although there was not much evidence of it. Whenever he had tried to play the part of the concerned parent as he felt he ought to do (hadn’t Bryn when David was doing his A levels all those years ago even checked topics off against his revision list?), Jamie’s teachers had met him with an amused reassurance that made him feel foolish. Jamie would sail through, they said. He couldn’t fail to do well. Arts subjects anyway, David told himself, were so different to the sciences.

  Before he went to bed, David stood outside the back door to check the deep chill in the garden now that the sun was long gone: he worried about them in the tent. He carried out a spare duvet and fiddled with the tent flaps, peering through; in the light from the kitchen he could just make out their huddled shapes, Suzie lifting her head to stare at him. Inside the tent the air was sweetly frowsty as a mouse nest.

  —I brought another duvet, he said. —I worried you wouldn’t be warm enough.

  Suzie didn’t answer for a few more moments, as though she couldn’t find her way out of her sleep. —We’re fine, she said eventually, still blurry. —We don’t need it. But thank you.

  On Friday evening Menna and her boyfriend drove up to collect the campers in a shabby old Bedford Dormobile van, painted with giant flowers in some unsuitable paint that was flaking off. David wanted to ask, is it safe, is it MOTed, have you checked the tyres?; but he bit down the words, kept his hands in his pockets, knowing his disapproval made him prim, fussing while his wife was carried off by gypsies. He saw perfectly through Menna’s contemptuous black-button eyes, ringed round with black kohl pencil, what she made of where they lived: the shallow-rooted, expensive little brick-built estate with its pointless cottage porches, its raw gardens newly scratched on the red earth. The boyfriend was amiable and competent, he had a ponytail and hard brown hands (apparently he worked for the Parks Department, on a project conserving the old Cardiff cemeteries). He stowed Suzie’s tent and luggage neatly in the back of the van and hoisted the children inside. Their noisy exit – the children at least turned and waved – hollowed out the evening; David could still hear the drone of the motorway when he went inside, as if the walls of his house had lost their solidity. He stood at the kitchen window, looking over their garden with its new-planted trees, past the green folds of the golf course and the clotted evening shadows of the old estate behind its wall, where the rhododendrons would be in flower now, to where the first line of hills swelled in the north: intently he listened to the crunching of cars on the gravel drives, doors banging, mealtime pots and pans, an insect slamming into the window, cats padding along the tops of fences.

  On the way back from Sainsbury’s the next morning (Suzie had left him a list), David called in at Giulia’s. He had been afraid that Giulia’s face would close regretfully when she saw him, but he was enveloped immediately in her capacious interest and clouds of the flowery perfume she wore. She was in her dressing-gown, with cream patted on her cheeks.

  —I’m so glad it’s you: I meant to invite you round, I know you’re on your own. What kind of weather have the campers got? It’s not brilliant, but at least not raining. How’s Jamie? Come on in, you’re my excuse for coffee. It’s a dreadful mess in here as usual: nobody’s cleared the breakfast things. Larry’s escaped into the studio. You wouldn’t think it but honestly we’ve been up for hours: why doesn’t the morning ever get started?

  Giulia and Larry lived in the big dilapidated house Larry had inherited from his aunt along with the dance studio; while they were talking the thump of feet and snatches of disco music drifted from where Larry was taking classes next door. There were always visitors at Giulia’s, drinking coffee or something stronger, eating pasta when Larry cooked it: family, staff from Ladysmith, the girls’ teenage friends, a brain-damaged neighbour in a wheelchair, refugees from every kind of crisis. David wondered if he counted as one of those. Sometimes when he and Suzie were invited for drinks a very thin old lady, another of Larry’s aunts perhaps, would be perched on a tall stool in the corner, taking in everything, prompting in brittle bursts of Italian when the guests needed their glasses refilled. Giulia put the coffee on and went upstairs to change; the girls, with tight golden skin and tight clothes and hair the same dark blonde as hers, erupted with loud bird-chatter into the dining room where David sat at the table with the crumbs and eggshells, not minding that he couldn’t answer their questions. When were they going to go and feed the horse? Was Larry going to take them into town when he’d finished? Did anyone think this navel piercing was festering? Giulia, hurrying down, tying back her hair, apologised that the coffee was poisonous: only Larry could make it decently and he was never there.

  —I’m so angry, she said. —One of my asylum-seeker families was deported yesterday: Sudanese. Do you know how they do it? They pick up the children and threaten to take them into care unless the parents proceed to the airport. Do you think that’s civilised?

  David really didn’t, and in fact he’d done some public health work recently for the Refugee Council; they conferred for a while. The girls melted away, uninterested. Giulia wanted to work out some strategy with the Council so that she and her school governors could prevent this happening at Ladysmith again; David didn’t think it would be possible.

  —And what do you make of this Menna? he asked, regretting it as soon as he had spoken. —She and Suzie seem to be great friends all of a sudden.

  —Do you mind it? Giulia’s open attention was expertly kind.

  —It’s not personal. Just all the fakery: the fortune telling, the old hippie bus, the ankle bracelet. Suzie used to be more impatient with that New-Agey stuff than I was.

  —It doesn’t do any harm, does it? They’ve only gone camping. And I quite liked the ankle bracelet. I was thinking of getting one. Am I too old? I daren’t ask the girls, I know what they’ll say.

  —Of course it doesn’t do any harm. Only Suzie surprises me, that she can’t see through it.

  —There’s more to some of that old nonsense than you and I would like to think. My grandmother – a horrible old woman – had second sight, I swear it. She used to have a certain dream – always of water – the night before any accident happened in the family.

  David could only look blankly then, embarrassed for Giulia: what was one supposed to say, confronted with the cherished superstitions of one’s friends? His own rationalism was so complete, penetrating all his instincts, that he felt any unreason almost as a mistake of taste as well as judgement, shaming and silly.

  Jamie had taken to calling in at Firenze. The first time he came, after their meeting at the café, Kate was painting Billie’s toenails in the middle of the afternoon. He persisted at the front door, which she answered holding the pot of cherry-red varnish, her own fingers splayed because she was drying them.

  —I told you everything about Francesca, she said. — There’s nothing else.

  —I was going to offer to help. I wondered if you needed anything. I could sit with your mother. I could cut your grass.

  She sighed and let him follow her into the drawing room, where Billie was waiting with her bare feet up on the sofa. Kate took them on her lap and began painting again, bending low over the gnarled old toes in concentration. Billie was still vain enough to enjoy asking for a size three in the shoe shops, but her feet were swollen and purplish, and she suffered with bunions so that Kate had sometimes to cut her shoes away.

  —Forgive our dreadful manners, Billie smiled graciously at Jamie. —How very rude of us.

  He sat on the edg
e of a chair, blushing, staring round everywhere but at the nail-painting. —It’s kind of you to let me in.

  —Who is he? Billie asked loudly, but Kate pretended not to hear.

  —I love this house, he said. —What an amazing place.

  —See the grass. Kate signed to him to look out of the French windows. —Not so lovely. You’d need a scythe.

  —There is a scythe, offered Billie unexpectedly. —In one of the outhouses.

  —It will be blunt. If it’s there at all. She’s probably remembering something from half a century ago.

  —I’ll sharpen it, Jamie said. —If it exists.

  Reluctantly, when she had finished Billie’s nails, Kate found keys and opened the outhouses where she hadn’t looked for years. Cobwebs were thick as filthy rags on all the accumulated rubbish: ladders, paint pots, her old stereo player from the seventies, a pedal sewing machine, a birdcage, bicycles, a workbench with jamjars full of nails rusted into one mass. Jamie wondered and exclaimed – look at this, it’s an antique! – but Kate refused to be interested. Then, when they’d found the scythe, and he had decided it wasn’t too rusty, sharpening it on a whetstone he’d also found, the afternoon was altered by the rhythmic swish of Jamie at work on the lawn: Kate opened the French windows and the room was filled with the perfume of the cut grass. The weather was close and grey. After some experimentation he found the right measured swing to make the grass fall cleanly; he took his shirt off and his face ran with sweat. Kate was exasperated by the careless young power in his brown back and shoulders and couldn’t concentrate on her book. It was Billie’s suggestion when he’d been working for an hour or so that they should make him tea; Kate brought out a table and chairs onto the veranda, carefully because the wood was rotten in places. Sim, displaced from the lap he was allowed on while she was reading, wound cabbalistic patterns round her feet.