The Master Bedroom

by Tessa Hadley

  —This has to be our secret, she made clear. —This isn’t a relationship, in the daytime. I have to trust you that no one will ever, ever know that this has happened, even after I’m dead.

  —You won’t be dead, he said reassuringly, as if he could promise that.

  Eight

  EVIE’S GOING HADN’T been discussed; and then was suddenly precipitated in a flurry of calls on her mobile, which she took hurrying out of the room, then murmuring subduedly, jackknifed on her heels on the patio or in the hall, crouched over nursing her words as if they were dragged out of her in painful cramps. Then, after all, she wasn’t going back to whoever it was she spoke to for those long sessions (Suzie said, ‘another one of her all-too-married men’), but was flying out instead to spend a week with their parents in Spain.

  —You must be mad, said Suzie shortly. —I’d rather spend a week in a police cell. In fact that’s probably where you’ll end up. Don’t get involved in any of their scams, don’t bring anything back for them in your suitcase. Don’t lend them any money.

  —It’ll be Spain, said Evie. —I can just toast mindlessly on the beach, can’t I?

  —It’ll be too hot to go out of doors.

  —I want to make a new start.

  —I suppose those have always been their speciality.

  —They’re getting older, you know, Evie said apologetically.

  Suzie drove down with the children to the Gower chalet: it was the first week of the school holidays, and she and David had talked about the possibility of his going with them, catching the train back in time for work on Monday, as politely as if they were seriously considering it. Hours after the others had left, he looked up from his e-mails in the study and saw that Evie, finished packing, had gone to smoke at the bottom of the garden; she observed the house rules exaggeratedly scrupulously, though David didn’t care about smoking as he used to. A clematis that Suzie had planted and then neglected drooped against the rawly new larch fencing; Evie on the bench with her head tilted back among its leaves waved up at the house; Jamie must have hailed her from his skylight. It was a muffled grey evening, with a warm wind stirring up in fits and starts; the garden roses glowed garishly and the brown soil, brought in for the beds when the houses were built, was parched around their roots. David wandered out to sit with Evie, stopped her grinding out her half-smoked cigarette.

  —I ought to turn the hose on this lot, he reflected without much interest.

  She looked at him kindly with her blue used crinkled eyes, and he thought she might say something about his marriage, but she didn’t. Perhaps she was afraid of her younger sister: Suzie’s bright contemptuous glance flashed sometimes these days with a glint that made David think of a sword or a gun. She made her entrances and exits as if, all the time she was home, she had to be braced heroically, enduring something difficult. He had to try hard to remember all those ordinary years when they had seemed to be coexisting affectionately enough. Evie’s attention was drawn up again to Jamie’s skylight, open wide, and his head framed in it, leaning on his arms: he must be standing on a chair. David wondered what you could see from up there.

  —Such a nice kid, Evie said. —Jamie. Remember when he had that awful duck he took everywhere, he wouldn’t let it go into the wash.

  —Called Groggy. David had forgotten. —Smelled groggy too.

  —Poor little thing: I mean, what he was like then.

  —Yes.

  —You were very patient with him. Now, he’s gorgeous. You don’t often mention his mother. How could she do what she did? Jamie wasn’t actually there, in that flat, at the time?

  —No. She’d left him at her mother’s. She was supposed to be feeling better: going to a friend’s party. Who knows when she changed her mind? Actually, the flat was full of her clothes all over the place. She was always untidy, especially when she was depressed. But it looked as if she might have been trying things on, thinking of going out.

  —Oh, that’s awful. I’ve done that same thing, tearing clothes off and on in front of the mirror, and nothing’s right. I mean, not the same thing, of course. But it is a kind of despair, I do understand it.

  —And after all she was wearing her dressing-gown.

  She made her voice small. —You mean when she died?

  —Fell from a sort of tiny balcony, where people dried their washing. On the ninth floor.

  —It couldn’t have been an accident?

  —Oh no. The wall was up to here. He showed with his hand. —Quite safe for the child. For anyone. Pierced through, so that you could see out.

  When he came home after dropping Evie off at the coach station, David went in search of his son: unusually the attic stairs were down. The chair was still where Jamie must have been standing on it to look out (perhaps he often did that), but he was at his desk, working on the old Mac Classic he’d had from Granny Bell years ago, when she’d replaced it. David had offered to buy him a new computer and arrange for Internet access up here, but Jamie didn’t want it. The little postcard-size black-and-white screen glowed in the gathering dusk, humming with importance, making grey the austere mess of the room, where the boy’s possessions were thrown around carelessly as if to show they didn’t have enough weight, yet, to tie him to the spot. Nothing was pinned on the sloping walls. David sat down on Jamie’s bed. He didn’t ask what he was working on, now that all his exams and school work were over – too many of his conversations with this son recently had seemed to be interrogations. Jamie stopped tapping keys and closed a document.

  —I was wondering about that cycling trip, David said.

  In the winter – David making an effort he had failed to live up to since – they had desultorily discussed going off together for a few days in the Beacons; David had a bike, newer and smarter than Jamie’s, shamefully less used.

  —What, now? Jamie was puzzled rather than hostile.

  —I could take a few days off work next week. I could do with a break.

  The boy’s face was obscure in the shadows. David could still be taken aback by the bulk and broad shoulders of this child whose once-smallness, limbs tiny and perfect and quick, he could still imagine under his hands.

  —I don’t know, said Jamie warily. —It’s not a good time for me.

  —No?

  David might have protested that Jamie – extraordinarily, surely – wasn’t doing anything whatsoever, not preparing for the college place he hadn’t applied for, not working to earn money.

  —I’m kind of tied up here just at the moment, Jamie said.

  David was relieved anyway: he was unfit, he wasn’t on form, probably he’d never have been able to keep up with his son on a bike. —Never mind then. It wasn’t important, just a thought.

  —Though I suppose a bike trip might be OK: if it was just for a couple of days.

  —Only if you were keen.

  —I’ll think about it, shall I?

  —Do you still have that duck?

  —Duck?

  —Groggy. Evie reminded me about it.

  Jamie, obviously remembering it for the first time in years, looked around for a moment vaguely, as if his old toy might really be in one of his heaps of things. —I should think Suzie burned it, he said, but without rancour. —Wasn’t it a health hazard?

  —You know, you should invite your friends round, David said.

  Jamie was blank.

  —We’d like it if you brought them here. Or girlfriend, if there is one.

  —There isn’t one.

  David guessed that Jamie reddened, though the light was so bad that he couldn’t be sure of it, and he felt remorse for embarrassing him all the way down the folding stairs: descent was noisy and comical, heads gliding out of sight through the trapdoor in stages. Jamie managed his exits in style, throwing himself in a twisting movement, one hand on the stair, from the third step, landing bent kneed with a single more or less muffled thump (the children were strictly forbidden to imitate this). Safe on the landing David paused, unti
l he heard the typing resume. Jamie’s childhood diaries – the last a beloved five-year one with a gold padlock, only kept up for three – had once been given to his father to read; David had searched them in vain for signs of whatever inward misalignment had driven the little boy’s troubled outward life, his tantrums and obsessions. The diaries had been all hope and light: ‘We went to the park, it was good. We fed the ducks, it was a nice day. We came to Grany’s and I had chips.’ Now – David’s honour was impeccable in such matters, he was incapable of reading anyone else’s letters even left lying on a table, or looking in their opened e-mails – he would never know what his son had to write about.

  He was surprised that he had told Evie about the clothes thrown all over Francesca’s flat: the picture was mostly one he warded off successfully (he didn’t think he’d ever told Suzie about it, and certainly not Jamie). That flat had been a bleakly ugly place, and while Francesca was still alive, for the months she lived there, he had blamed her in his thoughts (at that point they had hardly talked, they met to hand Jamie over) because she hadn’t made any effort to superimpose her own taste over the previous tenants’ dreadful brown and orange paint; it had seemed part of her wilfulness, her dramatised performance of suffering. When she was dead he thought he should have guessed what she would do, that the brown and orange paint had been a sign of it; which hadn’t made him any less angry. He and her mother together had had to empty the place out, sorting Francesca’s things from Jamie’s clothes and toys: he would have done it by himself, but Jane Bell insisted. She had chosen certain things of her daughter’s to keep, the rest they put into sacks for the charity shops. She had not broken down once all that day, that was the sort of woman she was; although she told him afterwards that it had taken seven years before she was ever surprised by happiness again, after Francesca’s death. ‘The funny thing was,’ she had said, ‘that although I knew she had meant to do it, I became terrified of accidents happening, to the other people I loved. I couldn’t not mind, that they weren’t safe. I mean, as nobody’s safe, that’s all.’

  Without Jane Bell, in the time before Suzie moved in with him, David couldn’t ever have managed Jamie’s childcare while carrying on working for his Part One exams, and then as Senior Registrar. She was someone he admired uncomplicatedly; he didn’t see her more because he was afraid he bored her. He went out and watered the garden with the hosepipe in the dark. If he had been asked a few months ago, he would have said he was in essence a family man, bound up in those other lives overlapped with his; now he didn’t love his children any less, but felt his connection to them less permanent. His attention was newly drawn to those parts of himself that had been shrouded in abeyance, in the strong ordinary daylight of family fuss.

  Kate found that after she had made love with Jamie she could fall asleep, without pills; not into her usual shallow nerve-racked half-doze, but an abandoned deep repose, voluptuous, full of dreams. One of the dreams – or an imagining that she had of herself curled up against him which drifted into a dream – was that his body lying on its side was a sheltering continent, the curve of it a great bay in which she was moored, hardly rocking on the sea-swell, safe. Once she was fastened there she could let herself fall down and away inside the strong ring of his arms, his breathing against her hair. Even that first night she’d slept, under the scratchy blankets. It was quite absurd, she thought, that out of all possible couplings this one – which also harrowed her with guilt, and seemed the most awful mistake – made her the gift of this peace. Max after all was so nice, everyone had approved of Max, she had approved of him herself; but distinctly she remembered that she had always had to jump up from his bed at a certain point as if it was intolerable, gritty or itching, or the sheets too rumpled; she had had to put on her dressing-gown, and find her cigarettes, and talk, or read her book. Often she fell asleep long after Max did, in one of his expensive Swedish posture chairs, with her feet tucked up under her.

  Sometimes Jamie must have slept too; but mostly when Kate did come awake, like swimming up from deep water, she found he was watching over her. Then in her sleepy state she would slide languidly into making love again, yielding to it as an extension of dreaming. Probably Jamie made up for his wakefulness, sleeping all day at home: he had nothing else to do. What had happened was a revelation for him – moored against him, she was his new continent. She could remember first discovering at his age, hidden inside ordinary life, the bliss of sex, running counter to everything else experience was teaching, the bustling commonsensical entropic drive. Jamie really wasn’t doing anything else in his life apart from his relation with her: she was impressed, although she took care not to show it. No wonder his father worried about him. He had friends he liked, but she guessed that he didn’t tell them much about himself: he said they didn’t share his tastes in books and films, that mostly what they did together was drugs; they listened to music, they went dancing at certain (superior) clubs in town. ‘We joke about things,’ he said. ‘Already, we’re reminiscing together over our school-days.’ He made music on a computer (what he called music, not her kind) with one of them, the ginger-haired boy she’d met.

  She asked who he’d had sex with before her, and made him tell her in detail about the two girls his own age, both at parties, neither time very successful or satisfying. What were their names? she wanted to know. What did they look like? How do you get on with them now? What about the one I met in the café? Did you ever have any homosexual experiences? He had a pent-up articulacy, unpractised, bookish; obediently he told her everything. She was pleased with his irony, forgiving himself his inexperience without angst, but keen to leave it behind.

  —I’ll bet lots of the girls like you, she said. —You’re just the type. With your private life only showing in little clues and signs, just enough for someone to make a cult of. Cruelly indifferent, just because you’re not trying to be. Your lovely wide child’s face: thick curdy skin, like a hero in a fairy tale, gleaming in expectancy, waiting to be marked. When you’re a man it will be a moody face, d’you know that? People close to you will watch it nervously.

  —Curdy? he wondered, smiling into her face close to his, stroking her skin with his finger.

  —Curds and whey. Creamy. It’s a thing nobody eats any more, we only know about it from nursery rhymes. I would have liked you desperately, if you’d been in my sixth-form class. I would have done everything, awfully, misguidedly, to catch your attention and impress you, and you’d have been disgusted at my showing off, embarrassed for me.

  —It’s rubbish, he said. —I would have liked you. I would have known. But I’m glad you’re not a girl.

  —They’re awful, aren’t they?

  He frowned, perplexed how to answer; but only pleasurably. He didn’t wish she talked less in bed: some men had. —Not awful. But perhaps: chaotic.

  —You see? How cruel you would have been? Chaotic: that was it, exactly.

  —How many lovers have you had? he asked her once, shyly.

  —After a certain point one stops counting. It wouldn’t be dignified.

  Another time he asked, in a pause in their lovemaking: —What do you think of me?

  —Think of you? I don’t think I’m thinking exactly, at this moment.

  —No, but. When you do think, what do you think?

  —Well: try to imagine how ignorant you seem to me.

  —Oh. He was disconcerted.

  —It’s not reproach; just a way of describing the deserts of distance between us. I don’t only mean things in books, although I do mean those.

  —And I suppose by the time I catch up with you, you’ll know more: you’ll always be ahead.

  Kate laughed. —It doesn’t work like that. By the time you catch up with me I’ll be an old woman.

  She always made him go before it was light because it was tolerable somehow – even touching – to watch him dressing in the almost-dark, belting his jeans and tying up his trainers with unconscious grace; in the daylight she couldn�
��t have borne it.

  —When can I come back? he asked before he left: flatly, humbly, so she knew that in between times he only waited. —Tonight?

  —Not tonight, she said. —I’m busy. Not tomorrow. Thursday, maybe. Come in the evening and play the piano: Billie misses you. Then we’ll see.

  —Thursday. OK.

  Left alone that first morning, seeing the welter of blankets knotted with the counterpane, she had been afraid that Buckets and Mops would guess more than she wanted them to know about what had happened, when they came to clean; in the dawn light, wrapped in her kimono, she stripped old Sam’s bed down to the striped lumpy mattress and made it up again properly, the cat winding obstructively around her feet or jumping into the sheets as she spread them. In the airing cupboard there were tall piles of clean white linen sheets, smoothly ironed from the laundry, the laundry mark written with indelible ink in every corner; shaking them out she saw that they were full of holes, or worn thin as tissue in places. They smelled of bitter damp; the smell of semen, that she was aware of when she spread out the blankets, seemed clean and youthful by contrast. When she was a teenager, that new male smell had been associated proudly for her with triumphs of initiation; in her adult relationships she seemed to have forgotten to notice it. In those promiscuous teenage years Kate had set herself an appalling kind of game, to try to have sex in every room in Firenze. She’d run out of interest in the game, or never achieved it anyway, before she went off to university and different quests. Certainly she couldn’t remember ever making love in Sam’s master bedroom before; perhaps she’d held it off for last, because the room seemed daunting, haunted.

  Somehow, on the bicycle trip that was meant to be an occasion for David’s healing his estrangement from his son, Bryn invited himself along. David was incandescently angry with his father for about an hour on the evening before they set out, but Bryn didn’t even realise that he minded; he brought round maps and sat planning with them at the kitchen table in transparent boyish enjoyment. In his cycling helmet Bryn looked – Jamie said – like an ancient Celt, long white hair sticking out all round; under his ungainly too-short shorts, zipped tight round the out-thrust belly, the huge knees and ropey calves made his light racing bike comically insubstantial in contrast. They had reduced the distances they planned to cover for Bryn’s sake, and as it turned out David was grateful; Jamie seemed to idle effortlessly while the two of them laboured and sweated. Freewheeling downhill, Bryn bellowed out Welsh hymns or extracts from the Bach oratorio he was rehearsing with his choir, and Jamie joined in with loud hootings; on the long uphills Bryn and David got off and walked, while Jamie, standing up on his pedals, legs pumping in a low gear, strove all the way to the top.