The Master Bedroom

by Tessa Hadley

  She lay down and closed her eyes, as if to dream about it, and fell immediately asleep.

  Kate Flynn sent the Robertses an invitation to a musical evening: Suzie pinned it on the noticeboard in the kitchen among all the other notes from school and swimming club, the photo of Hannah winning the sack race, Joel’s drawings of bird-people with hawk-faces and wings in place of arms. On its stiff plain cream card, Kate’s spiky black italics written in fountain pen seemed a sign of stern difficulty, and neither David nor Suzie mentioned the card’s arrival or discussed whether they would go. Eventually David’s mother brought up the subject, sitting at the kitchen table when David came in one evening, late from work. Suzie was cooking at the stove amid steam and a clattering of pans: David’s awareness these days went obliquely at once to his wife when he came into the house, so that he could know how their quarrel stood. The fish pie and carrots and frozen peas were a performance for his mother, not to deceive her but to appease her. Jamie was laying the table carefully, even putting out bread and paper napkins; he was better at charming and courting Betty than David had ever been. Betty’s quiet domestic ideal was substantial in any room she was in, so that none of them while she was there could move without edging past it; even though she often came these days to escape from Bryn, to complain how he didn’t have enough to do, how he followed her round the house, pestering her over the tiny details of shopping and tidying.

  —I didn’t know you were in touch with Kate Flynn, Betty said, seeing the invitation. —Poor thing. You know she’s come home to look after her mother?

  —David is in touch, said Suzie. —I don’t really know her. We’ve bumped into one another once or twice.

  —Carol worries about her. She thinks she’s taken on too much. I must say that of all people I wouldn’t have expected it of Kate: she didn’t used to treat her mother very well. Of course you remember, David, Mrs Flynn used to teach Carol the piano.

  —I know them, Jamie said unexpectedly, pausing with his hands full of knives and forks as if he might have added something more.

  —You’re bound to have come across them at Carol’s, Betty said. —Carol and Kate have been friends, not for ever, but from when they were in the third year, in the same class at Howells. Have you been to their house, Suzie? You ought to go to the musical thing, just to see it. It’s an extraordinary old place, a bit of Cardiff history. The grandfather must have had a lot of money, but I should think they’ve spent most of it by now. Carol says they haven’t changed anything in there, they could open it up as a museum.

  —I’ve been there, Jamie said. —I’d like to live like that.

  Suzie was amiable, draining vegetables. —What, in an old ruin? That would suit you.

  —Like what? said David. —How’ve you been there?

  —They live as if they’d just been dropped onto earth from outer space. As if all the boring stuff didn’t matter.

  Suzie only laughed at him now but she and Jamie had fought once, literally, pulling hair and scratching faces, over his refusal to tidy his room. Their truce wrong-footed David, after all the years he had dedicated himself to looking out for his impossible son (Jamie wouldn’t eat off coloured plates, he wouldn’t go to bed in his own room, he wouldn’t socialise with other children). No one would think, looking at the grown boy, coolly self-sufficient, that the child had taken such an effort of love.

  —I expect they had servants once, said Betty. —To do all the boring stuff.

  —Will we go? Suzie asked, from where her face was hidden behind the oven door. —To this musical evening?

  —Do you want to? David hadn’t been to the Flynns’ for a while; he’d held off as if he imagined Kate was disappointed in him somehow. He didn’t want Suzie looking round at the dilapidated old rooms, making a story out of them for her girlfriends; he felt protectively that Firenze belonged to him, he couldn’t bear it spoiled. And yet if she said she wanted to come, how could he not take it as an encouragement, when things were poised so uneasily between them?

  —All right, she said carefully. —I’m curious, I suppose. Probably I’ll regret it, I’ll get stuck talking to someone with a beard and a collection of early instruments.

  David didn’t know why Suzie was sleeping downstairs (she’d moved out of Joel’s room onto the spare bed in the study); she wouldn’t speak about it. She had once even put her hand over his mouth when he tried to ask her, shaking her head to warn him off, pushing him away from her with her fist against his chest: not unkindly but urgently, as if someone was watching them and she was under a vow of non-communication, although they were all alone.

  Kate looked brilliant in a dress of some sort of flimsy transparent black stuff that came halfway down her calves, embroidered with green and gold beads; she wore tall green shoes and dramatic glass jewellery like pantomime emeralds. For some reason when David had pictured the evening in advance he had imagined it – tenderly – as rather subdued and old-fashioned: a few of Billie’s old friends from the other houses around the lake, Kate’s string quartet, perhaps a couple of Carol’s colleagues. He knew as soon as he and Suzie got out of the car, from the hubbub of voices and the lights blazing, that he’d been stupidly mistaken. How could he have forgotten Kate’s teenage parties that had had to be crazier than everybody else’s, and where the police had invariably been called? They climbed the zigzag path and saw through the lit uncurtained dining-room windows the long table spread with fashionable food (Kate must have had a caterer); Billie’s old friends, propped chatting animatedly on their sticks and frames, were having the time of their lives in a press of animated interested strangers, dressed up and wound up, making party talk. There were children, too – surprising in this house – weaving their unnoticed paths among the adults. David’s mood withered: he remembered that he hated parties.

  The front door stood open, the porch was full of lights and flowers: a dark-haired woman he recognised as Billie’s babysitter offered to take their coats upstairs. Borne into the hall on a tide of hostess-importance – she almost seemed to have an entourage – Kate kissed them and welcomed them enthusiastically; the next moment there was someone arriving outside on the street, dropped by a taxi, and she was carried past them down the steps to greet a tall thin fair young American. They were shyly helpless in her wake, David wondering how he had ever thought himself Kate’s intimate.

  —Sherie couldn’t make it, the American was apologising to Kate: they came inside clinging together, Kate even in her high shoes having to tilt her head to see up to his height, he bending over her, youthful and easy, taking off his gold-rimmed glasses to wipe them. —You look great, Katie. At least I think you do: can’t see a thing.

  —Sherie’s always so busy, Kate sympathised. —We’ll have to make do with you all by yourself.

  —She’s got a deadline, writing something for Guardian Weekend.

  —David, Suzie, this is Max. We’re privileged that he’s prised himself away: Max is very domesticated these days.

  —Do you have children then? smiled Suzie, hopeful of some earthy common ground.

  —They’d like children, Kate said.

  —We don’t have children, Max said firmly, frowning at Kate.

  Suzie shrank, Kate waved them towards the drinks and then carried Max off to meet someone; for ten minutes after they’d taken glasses of something with bubbles from a girl with a tray David and Suzie were stranded foolishly together in a corner of the drawing room, searching for anything to say. Suzie asked whether it was champagne and David said he didn’t know, he couldn’t honestly tell the difference between that and fizzy wine. The French windows were pushed open onto the garden and couples were moving about out there in the close grey evening; the chopped-off grass lying on the lawn smelled heavily sweet, and coloured lanterns, still pale in the late daylight, hung in the trees. Children were taking turns to roll down a sharp slope at the far end of the garden, into the fence. David had an instinct that if he and Suzie once went outside they’d be los
t, they’d never be able to join in the party; after strolling round pretending to smell the roses they’d have simply to make a humiliated escape through some back gate or over a wall. They looked around them instead with exaggerated interest and talked about the house: filled up with life like this it didn’t look so much eccentric as privileged. The screen-partition between the drawing room and the library had been pushed back to make one vast space running the whole length of the back of the building; David had never properly noticed the chandeliers before, because when he visited Kate had only switched on the lamps. Suzie took in the grandeur: white dints came in her cheeks where her jaw tensed in resistance to it.

  Max the American seemed to know plenty of people, which suggested that lots of the guests were Kate’s friends from London. They were striking in ways which David thought of as belonging to the metropolis: a girl with a feathered cap, bird-face and bright vermilion lipstick; a small middle-aged man, light on his feet, with face expressively lined and a heavy Central European accent; a beautiful fat woman in a sari exposing satiny folds of bare midriff. They might have been simply the kind of Cardiff people David never met. Kate was continually tearing herself away from one group to bestow herself upon another: she waved plaintively at David and Suzie once, as if she yearned to arrive with them but couldn’t yet. David would have gone out of kindness to talk with Billie, except that where she sat like diminutive royalty in a tall velvet chair she was surrounded by admirers, so that his own claim on her memory seemed recent and shallow. Then Carol was suddenly in the room – late, loud, fearless – dressed in navy blue cut low on her freckled bosom.

  —We waited for you! Kate complained. —We couldn’t start anything without you.

  —But I had to get my glad rags on! You wouldn’t have wanted me all sweaty and dirt-streaked, honestly.

  —Sweaty and dirt-streaked? I thought you were supposed to be running the Housing Association, not building the houses yourself.

  David and Suzie were weakly grateful that Carol crossed the room to them through all the other claims on her sociability; Suzie hung on to her in relief.

  —This is an awful party, Carol. I don’t know anybody here.

  Carol’s arm was round her straight away. —Darling, you know me! Won’t I do? Come on, let me introduce you to everyone. David can look after himself.

  David obediently circulated. And after all he did know a few people: the viola player from Kate’s quartet (friend of a friend in the music department at the university), a consultant on the Public Health Committee who lived somewhere along the lake, a woman who knew Betty from the Cardiff Amnesty group (the musical evening was to raise money for Amnesty). He had a fragment of an interesting argument with Carol at one point, over problems with Assembly health policy (she was always ebulliently positive about the whole devolution thing, he wasn’t); by then it was time, anyway, for the music. They sat for the performance in chairs arranged around the baby grand at one end of the long room. David looked anxiously for Suzie and couldn’t find her at first; then when it was too late to offer to change places he saw she was standing propped alone in the doorway, tall in her white trouser suit, with a remote artificial smile, and a shy flush across her cheeks that made her eyes glint as if they were watering. When David looked round for her again in the applause at the end of the first piece she was gone.

  The playing wasn’t, of course, brilliant – there were some mistakes, the intonation was occasionally off, there was one false start to a movement in the Haydn (the cellist bungled it) – but the music touched him nonetheless with calm: he never knew how knotted his tension was until music undid it. Kate led the quartet in what attack it had. Her technique wasn’t perfect but she was brave and made a warm strong sound; he took pleasure in her confidence, her lifted authoritative head, her swaying back, the ferocity with which she dipped to turn the pages; he forgot to wonder why she hadn’t showed herself his friend this evening. Sometimes it seemed to him that her gaze rested on him while she played; not seeing him, only absorbed in private concentration. Returned to themselves at the end of each piece – after Haydn, Schubert – the quartet turned laughing eyes on one another, admiring their safe arrival, triumphant and diminished because it was over. As an encore Billie joined them on the piano for one movement from the ‘Trout’; the notes unfolded obediently from her blind hands with an eerie shallow deadpan like a musical box wound up, not unaffecting.

  David afterwards joined the crowd bringing Billie their compliments. She shone with dignified modesty, apologising for her old fingers, making perfect sense until urgently she put her hand on someone’s arm.

  —Is Michael here anywhere? Where’s Michael? I wonder what he thought.

  None of them intimates, they looked around blankly but hopefully for Michael, they asked for him: Carol was quickly there, squeezing Billie’s hand, cuddling her shoulders.

  —Michael would have thought you were wonderful. He really would. What a shame he couldn’t be here to hear you two play together.

  —Oh, isn’t he here? Billie was disappointed but not overthrown. —Such a gifted musician. I trust his judgement implicitly. Does he know Kate? Of course, he must know Kate, mustn’t he? She smiled puzzling into Carol’s face as if there were some conundrum there to tease out, an irritating blockage in possibility which must come clear if she persisted stubbornly enough.

  —She was asking for Kate’s father, Carol explained to David later with tears in her eyes, stricken by the music, or the old lady’s mistake; her tears always burdened her brother, he had longed for her sake, when he was a boy, for her to learn to conceal them.

  —Oh: is her father Michael?

  —Just as if he were in the crowd here somewhere. She’s never done that before, I don’t think; she’s been muddled, but not actually lost forty years. The father died a few months after Kate was born, you know: in the bed upstairs.

  —I’ve never asked.

  —Some sort of tuberculosis: of the spine? He was a violinist, he’d come over from Ireland to play for an orchestra here in Cardiff, that’s how they met. Isn’t it romantic; isn’t it poignant? You can imagine, Billie went out to all the concerts in those days: her mother and father were dead, she was a rich woman, she lived here all alone, she was nearly forty. Kate says she thinks he only married her for her money, and that he drank and slept around. But then you know what Kate’s like.

  —She’s not romantic.

  —Or it’s just another kind of romance, isn’t it?

  David looking for Suzie – thinking they could leave with their honour intact now the music was over – met Max in the dining room, eagerly friendly, glasses glinting, making bobbing dives into the various dishes – heaped up couscous salad, pink rolls of cold beef – from his great height, like a heron fishing.

  —What a fantastic evening! Like being inside a Chekhov story. The lake, this amazing old house, people gathered to make music, all the generations socialising together. I want to come down here and live like this. So civilised!

  David thought that Max’s account of the party wasn’t like any Chekhov he’d read. Kate had recently lent him her translations of some of the stories; the characters mostly seemed to grind unhappily against one another, locked in misunderstanding. Kate told him they were funny but he didn’t see it.

  —Are you a colleague of Kate’s at Queen Mary’s?

  —Just an old friend. Not smart enough to be an academic. I work for English Heritage.

  When David said he was looking for Suzie, Max put down his plate in concerned helpfulness, as if he would start a search. —She’s been around, she was in here earlier.

  Recrossing the hall, David bumped into her coming out from the downstairs lavatory, the one he knew from his other visits to the house: at the end of a tiled passage, with a long wooden seat like a hinged shelf.

  —It has a cistern on the wall and a chain hanging down, exclaimed Suzie in wonder. —I’ve never used one like that before. You can buy them in reproduction
now, I know: but they’re terribly expensive.

  Their coats regained, their farewells left cowardly unmade (when they’d peeped round a door, Kate had been too deep for interruption in some group joke), absolved of public performance, they were suddenly uneasily thrown together in the car; aware of the near-audible ticking of thought. The engine starting up was a relief. Always on such occasions, without ever having discussed it, they used the car in the archaic configuration: David in the driving seat and Suzie the passenger. Used to the convention, apart from the first glass of fizzy wine, he had only helped himself to water; she could have had several more glasses of wine if she had wanted to bolster herself, but she struck him as bleakly cold sober.

  —It wasn’t too bad? he hoped, not really believing it.

  Instead of talking to him she exhaled as if she was getting rid of something, and threw her head back, staring up through the dark at the felt lining of the tin roof.

  —Will you let me out? she said then, as they drove alongside the lake, which sent its pale signal flashing like a code between the passing trees.

  —Let you out?

  —Not here. I’ll give you directions.

  He pulled up in the middle of the empty road. — What?

  —Just drop me off somewhere. I’ll get a taxi back later. I’m not ready to come home yet.

  Baffled, he held his hands spread in the air above the steering wheel. —It wasn’t that bad.

  —You don’t know.

  He had to drive off again: it wasn’t late enough for there to be no traffic.

  —Well, perhaps it was that bad: I hate parties anyway. You’re supposed to be the sociable one.

  —Between the time the music stopped and when we left, said Suzie, —what’s that? Three-quarters of an hour? forty minutes? In all that time nobody spoke a word to me. I didn’t speak a word to anybody. I just moved around from room to room as if I was always on my way somewhere else. Then I went into the toilet and stayed there for as long as I dared, only I was afraid there’d be a queue and someone would come rattling at the door.