The Master Bedroom

by Tessa Hadley

  —But you have to make an effort. You can’t expect people who don’t know you to talk to you when you’re hurrying past them. You have to go up and talk to them. They weren’t being unfriendly as such.

  —You’re right, of course, I know that. Only I got in a state where I couldn’t.

  —And now you want to be by yourself for a bit.

  She looked at him; her directness was only equivocal because he couldn’t return it, he had to watch the road. —Not by myself. With my friends.

  Her face was impossible to read, anyway; when he did glance over its point was overridden by the shifting street lights, car lights, the muddying orange city illumination.

  —Turn left here, go back down the park. They live in Splott: it isn’t too far.

  Dumbly, he drove where she told him to go, down past where the park became a wide-open recreation ground, through Roath and onto Newport Road, then over the Beresford Road railway bridge. He knew most of the streets they drove through even if he didn’t know their names; but they pulled up eventually in front of an improbable little row of cottages he’d never noticed before. He couldn’t make them out very well in the dark: they might have been built for railway workers, and were probably older than most of the surrounding late-Victorian development. Behind the huddle of their overgrown front gardens they seemed to promise a cosier secrecy than the austere long terraces with their doors opening more or less straight onto the street.

  —This is it, said Suzie. —I’ll see you later: but don’t wait up.

  His reluctance wasn’t exactly passionate jealousy. Perhaps it ought to be: but he couldn’t really believe, however opaque Suzie’s behaviour had been in these last weeks and months, that she could have instructed him so calmly to drop her off at this house if she was planning to meet some lover inside it. Anyway, he presumed the house was Menna’s, where she lived with her boyfriend, so the lover wasn’t a practical idea. But whatever did Suzie imagine justified her stubborn refusal to explain herself to him, to give him a word, even, or a clue? Why couldn’t she learn, as other people did, the grace to carry off a party like this one they’d been to? No one required her to enjoy it. Well, so he was free, again: she pressed his freedom on him.

  —Can’t I come in with you?

  —No, she said, and put a hand on his arm, as if postponing something, promising something else for some other time.

  He watched her pick her way up a path whose faint paleness was blurred by overgrowing shrubs and then lost in the thick overhang of shadows from the house; he knew she turned to look at him once because he made out the weak blob of her face. Then another car, lights glaring, came up behind him and he had to move. He drove round the block to come past the house again, and paused with the engine running, peering into the garden. There was no sign of habitation to be made out beyond the shrubs, apart from the dim gleam in a glass fanlight above the front door. But Suzie in her white trouser suit was vanished, swallowed presumably inside.

  The party did not do Kate any good. Some of her friends stayed on afterwards, filling up for the weekend the empty bedrooms, feasting on party leftovers round the dining-room table, taking their wine over to the park in afternoon sunshine to sprawl like a Watteau fête champêtre on the grass, in the flickering shade under the trees, while the children some of these friends had brought played ball or pestered for ice cream. As long as her friends were with her she could pretend to herself that it had worked, that she had been restored – by the jokes, the confessions, the touching and kissing, her own rather showy performance of ironising contentment – to what Carol called her ‘old self’.

  But when they went it made things even worse. Her old self anyway had been a precarious entity: now it was seized for a few days, not by a depression as she might have expected, but by a mania that burned her up. She was possessed all the time by the idea of David. Passion, she thought, must have seized wealthy women like this – like cramps or fits – in the old days, when an abyss yawned in the hours between breakfast and dressing for dinner, with nothing to fill them but reading novels and gazing in the mirror, imagining things, gasping and moaning all alone. Work ought to be the cure: Kate tried to get on with her translation, but either she stared at it stupidly or her thoughts raced as if she was speeding. Whatever semblance of order she had begun to establish in her life in the house with Billie disintegrated; they sometimes didn’t get up until the afternoon, and she never knew what time it was when they went to bed because she had lost her watch somewhere over the party weekend. Jamie had connected her DVD player to the television; she rented old black-and-white Hollywood films which she and Billie watched in drugged absorption, sometimes two or three times over, Billie forgetting each time what was going to happen. Only the arrival of Buckets and Mops on their appointed days gave any kind of shape to time passing.

  Kate picked up the telephone, dialled David’s number, put it down again. She had wanted at the party to see past this fixation that she had surely, after all, erected for herself: she had wanted to expose, by positioning him alongside her cleverer lively friends, how dull, how ponderous and inconsequent he was. Obligingly when she had asked Max what he thought, he had said that David seemed like the kind of fellow who’d set your bone straight if you broke your arm.

  —He isn’t that kind of doctor, Kate said dully. —Or is that supposed to be some weird kind of sexual clue?

  —I just mean he seemed like a nice man who’d be good at his job, but that I don’t quite see what it is you’re so hung up on.

  —It’s precisely the aspect of it you can’t see, that makes it fatal. What do you think he thinks about me?

  She dreaded herself, asking.

  Max was cautious. —Possibly, he seemed a little uxorious.

  —Uxorious? Oh, crap, Max, thanks for that.

  She had seen for herself how David looked round everywhere for his wife when he was sitting waiting for the music, and again while he was applauding at the end of the first piece. She had thought he and Suzie couldn’t wait to get away from the party together, they had hated it, they would have escaped sooner if they’d known how to, only they were too innocently, decently polite. She was haunted by David’s kind slight bewilderment at her treatment of him, her betrayal of their friendship. She groaned aloud, remembering how once when she played a false note his shoulders had contracted wincingly as if she drew the bow across his nerves; she imagined the scene sometimes, although she knew this was exaggerating, as if he had been the only one genuinely hearing the music, among all the other blank, bored, pretending faces.

  For several nights while Kate paced the house – her reading glasses propped abandoned on her open book in a pool of lamplight, Billie put to bed upstairs – police helicopters came hovering over the streets outside. You never knew what they were looking for, or whether they actually caught anybody; the agitating loud turmoil of their rotors came and went sometimes for what felt like hours. They seemed a visitation from a different world: Kate thought how, up here in the peace beside the lake, she was getting used to being privileged and set apart, like being forgotten. In London this wasn’t seriously possible anywhere: her nice first-floor flat, for instance, in a Georgian square with an enclosed residents’ garden, was two minutes’ necessary walk, on her way to the tube, from the bleak roaring Walworth Road with its metal-shuttered shops and minimarts plastered with fluorescent posters, selling stolen goods. Carol said the daily reminder of trouble was at least an inoculation against fear; that was why she preferred to live quixotically among her tenants in Adamsdown, even if it meant noise and scenes often, and difficulties with the dominatrix with samurai swords who lived upstairs. She said, goodness knows what hallucinations of danger and siege people are subject to, if they live anywhere too beautiful and too sequestered.

  One night, late, the Firenze doorbell jerked in the passage to the kitchen with its usual weakly expiring clatter. Absent-mindedly, even though it was an impossible time for anyone to call who didn’t have urg
ent or terrible news, Kate made her way in the dark through the little entrance vestibule with its empty shelves that still smelled sometimes of the bitter-peppery ghosts of past geraniums. When she pulled the door open a blast of warm night forced its way inside: importunate, humming with summer.

  —Oh, Jamie, no, she said. —It’s too late, I’m on my way to bed.

  This wasn’t true, but there was every reason for him to believe it; the house was in darkness behind her, she was reading, she had been pouring herself whisky in the kitchen. She couldn’t see his face: he was an outline, shamblingly youthful, hunched over his bike, smelling of booze and dope, his voice arriving out of the dense centre of shadows. For the first time she noticed that he spoke with a Cardiff accent; or perhaps he forgot, because he couldn’t see her, to make the adjustment between voices middle-class children learn to make according to the company they’re keeping. That accent, with its oblique flattened teasing, had moved and seduced her when she was a little posh girl at Howells.

  —I need to talk to you, he said. —I’ve finished my exams.

  —Seriously, you came to tell me that?

  —I’ve been out with my friends. But everything I had to say, I wanted to say to you. So I cycled round for a long time and then I came here.

  —Come back tomorrow.

  Jamie persisted, not moving, as if tomorrow was unthinkably another era; she made out in bulky silhouette against the fainter dark some top tied by its sleeves around his shoulders: he loomed especially large because she’d kicked off her heels earlier and was barefoot in the warmed grit of the floor. Resistance was insubstantial against his invisibly exerted pressure; reluctantly Kate permitted him to thud his bike across the threshold and prop it against the shelves of empty flowerpots. He followed her into the kitchen, breathing heavily: he must have been cycling fast and long. A forty-watt light bulb under the old plain white shade dispensed its gloom into the room’s farthest corners; it turned Jamie’s usually cream-coloured skin – as he paced round the room’s perimeter not seeing anything – crumpled and grey, gave him blue hollows under his eyes, showed up that his hair wasn’t clean and hung lank across his forehead. She knew how horribly, if he looked like this, the light must expose her: she took grim satisfaction in it. She poured him whisky – she had no idea what he drank but surely he drank lots, he was a young person, she had read about their drinking in the newspapers – and sat down at the kitchen table whose white enamel looked at that moment better suited to vivisection than to sociability. He drank the whisky down in thirsty swallows.

  —So how did they go? she obliged him without much interest.

  —How did what go?

  —The exams, stupid, that you came to tell me about.

  —Oh: that wasn’t that I came for. They went OK. I’m thinking maybe I should do Economics, to really understand how everything works. Only I should take a year off before I go to university anyway.

  —You’re lacking in vocation, it occurs to me.

  The fridge quivered to an end of one of its gulping, rattling ecstasies: Jamie, still standing, was suddenly frowningly aware of where he was. —Do we have to be in here?

  Kate shrugged. —I’m on my way to bed, remember?

  —But I need to talk to you: it would be better somewhere – less bright.

  His youthful self-absorption (he had hardly looked at her) was overbearing; he was full of portent, her scepticism was weightless and dry by comparison. What could it matter anyway where they sat? Passing through the hall again, carrying her glass and the bottle in one hand, she felt with the other for the old Bakelite switches, which sprang noisily but made no miracle of light: they were left picking their way through floating patches of jewel-colour where the street light in the curve of the road outside shone through the stained glass on the stairs.

  —I must get up a ladder tomorrow and replace these bulbs, she said irritably, knocking into Jamie who seemed to have stopped short. —I’ve been meaning to for weeks.

  —It’s better, he said, turning on her, his voice thick. —It’s what I wanted, so that I could talk to you. In that bright light I couldn’t. I’ve been here to the house already three times tonight, and gone away again and then come back.

  She decided he really was quite stoned, or drunk – not only from the whisky but from the beer he smelled of, that he must have had earlier with his friends – and she said so disgustedly, pushing him away; only he seized her free arm, clasped it tightly so that she felt the damp of his hot fingers through the loose knitting of her cardigan.

  —No: he seemed to consider impartially. —I’ve cycled it off.

  —Oh, listen, Jamie, let go of me. This is stupid.

  —It’s not stupid, he insisted. —You know what it is. You know it isn’t stupid.

  —I don’t want to know. Stop it. I’m old enough to be your mother, remember? I am precisely as old as your mother.

  She tried to pull free, he grabbed clumsily for her other arm, and seemed to be searching out her face with his: the bottle smashed down onto the floor tiles with a crash as loud as an explosion. Kate managed to hang onto her glass by the rim: she felt the bottle’s whisky pool around her toes. —Oh, don’t move! she cried out fiercely. —Broken glass absolutely everywhere!

  Her hands pinioning Jamie to the spot – as if he was a child, so that he wouldn’t step on the shards – weren’t tender.

  —And now you’ve woken Billie, she moaned. —You absolute idiot.

  Breathing into one another’s faces blindly at close quarters, inhaling the rising whisky fumes, they seemed to be able to hear the old lady’s bed creak upstairs as she sat up; then wakeful tentative silence.

  —It’s all right, Mummy, Kate called. —I’ve only dropped a glass.

  —Is it you, Kate?

  —Go back to sleep, darling. Nobody’s hurt.

  —Are you all right, Kate?

  —I’m fine. Go back to sleep.

  They listened until the bed creaked again as she lay down.

  —What I was trying to tell you . . . Jamie continued: he hardly seemed to feel responsible for what he’d caused, or even notice it, though he did lower his voice.

  —No! Kate hissed. —Don’t! Do you realise that I don’t have shoes on? She pictured herself marooned in a pool of viscous spirits and jagged glass pieces.

  —It’s all right. Jamie surrounded and encompassed her. —I have thick soles, I’m not afraid to walk in it. I’ll lift you.

  —But I don’t want to be lifted!

  Clumsily he landed kisses – on her hairline, and, stooping, on her collarbone.

  —Stop it! she protested.

  He lifted her across the mess and carried her into the library.

  His heat and urgency were a force; what was there in her to resist it? There was enough light at least for him to see to put her down on the old creaking protesting chaise longue.

  —This is a terrible mistake, she insisted, pushing him off. —You’ve just got a crush.

  —I’m completely serious. You don’t know how much I feel. I think about you all the time.

  —But you’ve got no idea about me.

  —How do you know what ideas I’ve got?

  He stroked back her hair from her face with the hot palms that she imagined calloused from his cycling, lowered himself beside her, kissed her so that she tasted through the drink and the cigarettes the young, strong cleanness of his mouth. He was awkward, inexperienced, anxious, but his youth was absolute; his weight pinned her down painfully, there wasn’t room for both of them side by side. She could have pushed him away again, she could have told him to stop. She told herself she would, in a moment. If anything, she yielded to him out of disappointment in herself: and out of boredom. She had nothing else to do.

  —At least take your boots off.

  Obediently, without letting go of her, he pushed them off one after the other with his feet; with shaking fingers he failed to unbutton her blouse, then thrust it up out of his way inste
ad.

  —I knew you didn’t wear a bra, he said.

  In her shame she only lay passively, not allowing herself to move or to respond.

  Needless to say after all the clumsy manoeuvring it was too quickly over; almost as soon as he was inside her, Jamie cried out in sharp regret and collapsed on her heavily, breathing wetly against her ear.

  —I was no good, he lamented, muffled.

  —It doesn’t matter.

  Coldly she looked past him, between her raised bare knees, a tangle of tights and knickers draggled from one ankle, at the dim room changed by what had happened in it. Well, it had been changed before, nothing would show, it wouldn’t make any difference.

  He lifted his head to search her face. —Was it any good for you? He was chaotic with the audacity of what had been accomplished.

  —For me it was the deepest possible disaster.

  —Next time, he tried to promise tenderly.

  —Next time? Kate rebuffed him. —Go home. Leave me alone. Don’t put the light on. I don’t even want to see what we have done.

  —But I can come back again?

  —Never again, she said. —Never.

  She lay turned away from him, staring into the back of the chaise longue, refusing to look while Jamie stumbled about, pulling up his trousers, finding his T-shirt, trying to lace his boots. She knew that he stood for a while mutely still, desperate for her to turn round and be kinder; then she heard him pick his way through the mess in the hall, sending some piece of glass skidding. She imagined, without herself stirring, that she heard the soft pressure of his bike tyres on the path, on the road. Half an hour later, in bed upstairs alone – she’d swept the whisky bottle, in the light from the library that she put on at last, into a sticky heap, in case Billie wandered downstairs in the dark – she was overwhelmed suddenly with a crowding detailed awareness of his body. The smooth hairless brown skin taut across his ribs, impregnated with flavours of marijuana and sweat; the hot nape of his neck, his hair pushed behind his ears; the jawline tensed and intent, the swallowings in his throat; the undainty big man’s feet still in their socks: these pressed in on her so that she had to bury her face in the pillow, trying to shut them away.