The Master Bedroom

by Tessa Hadley

—You’re not serious. I’m no good, I know, at being playful.

  —It started in the old days: I was a Trotskyite then, and no party was revolutionary enough.

  —Now?

  —Maybe the same thing. Or its opposite: no party is conservative enough. No party is interesting enough, anyway.

  —Kate. It was as if he made a huge effort, although he only leaned forward across the table. He was wearing a dark blue shirt, unironed, with the sleeves rolled up; she noticed the dark hair on his brown forearms. —I wish we weren’t quarrelling. I’m not really that interested in voting either.

  She put down her unlit cigarette and lighter heavily on the tablecloth, still without looking in his face. —Are we quarrelling?

  —I don’t know. Are we? But I would always like to be frank with you.

  —That’s usually bad news. That’s usually when people are going to say something horrible.

  —Nothing horrible.

  —Then it makes me feel sad. Because I’m not the sort of person people want to be frank with.

  —Aren’t you? Well, perhaps me neither. Don’t feel sad.

  Abruptly Kate stood up, scooping her things into her bag. —Actually I have to go. I promised my Billie-sitter.

  David stood up too, in consternation. —But you’ve hardly been here an hour. Surely they’ll be all right for a bit longer.

  She picked up some silly kid gloves that had been part of her dressed-up look. She had found them in a drawer in Firenze and they had made her too hot on the way over. Bending over them, she struggled to do up the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons on the inside of the wrists. —I shouldn’t have come out in the first place.

  —I’ll give you a lift.

  —No, really, I’d rather walk. Carol: do you hear? I’m going. For what it’s worth, she said to David, flinging her wrap over one shoulder, —I can’t bear to quarrel with you either. We are good friends, aren’t we?

  Kate gave David her hand, snatched it back, scrabbled off the glove, and gave him her bare fingers, in token of her sincerity; he grasped them hard. Carol came out from the kitchen protesting, wiping a mug with a tea towel. No one but them would have noticed anything happening.

  Nine

  ON THE FIRST day of the new school term, Giulia telephoned just as David came through the door from work.

  —Is Suzie there? she said.

  —I don’t think so.

  —She hasn’t been in today. Do you know what’s up?

  —Hasn’t been in?

  —Hasn’t even rung, all day. I mean, I know she’s been going through a bit of a time recently, but I’ve had a whole class without their teacher, on the first day of term, with a new pupil intake and two new members of staff. I could have done without it. Is she ill? David?

  The lights were all pointlessly on in the kitchen, even though it was still bright day outside. On the counters there was a mess of chocolate milk and scrapings from burned toast; the margarine tub had been ravaged, its lid was on the floor, greasy side down.

  —I did speak to her last night, he said. —She wasn’t here, she called: she was making sure Jamie could pick the kids up. I didn’t ask where she was calling from.

  —Listen, I’m sorry.

  —It didn’t occur to me she wouldn’t be at school today.

  —David, if there’s anything that we can do to help. Do you mean she’s actually walked out?

  —She hasn’t said so. But I suppose she’s just done it.

  Giulia sighed helplessly.

  —What about the other girl? David asked. —Menna?

  —Oh, she’s finished here. It was only a maternity leave, she finished in the summer. Do you think that’s where Suzie is?

  —I don’t know.

  —She’s bound to be in touch.

  —I’ll let you know.

  In the snug they had drawn the curtains against the daylight. The television capered weakly, the children hardly looked up as he peered in; Jamie was extended longways on the sofa, Hannah sitting under his raised knees, Joel at his head, with an arm thrown carelessly across his big brother’s chest; like somnambulants they gazed at the screen. David too felt as if, in spite of the sunshine, only one small swinging lamp of his consciousness was alight in a huge inert darkness. He put sausages to cook under the grill, opened tins of baked beans, cut his hand on the sharp edge of one of them, leaked surprising thin wet blood onto the bread. There wasn’t enough bread for them all, and when he looked into the freezer there wasn’t any left in there either. Hannah at some point planted herself, pouting, in the kitchen doorway and asked where Mummy was.

  —Not here, he said shortly.

  —Doesn’t she even live in this house any more or something?

  —Don’t ask me.

  Later, he thought, he would address all this with the children properly and as his better self. Little jets of fat shot out from the sausages and blazed up under the grill.

  —Only I’ve got bottom problems, Hannah said, —that you can’t deal with.

  He was wearily solicitous, putting down his fork. —I’m a doctor, remember? I’m sure I can help.

  —Don’t worry, she said gloomily, stumping off upstairs. —I’ll be just fine.

  He picked up his fork again. After a fairly long while she stumped down, and he forgot to ask if that meant her problems were over. They had their food in front of the telly; he sat with them to eat through his heavy plateful, although afterwards he couldn’t remember what he’d watched; he imagined the fatty food dissolving sourly in his stomach, sending spurts of acid into his oesophagus, squeezing his heart. He piled up the dirty dishes in the kitchen. Instead of talking to the children properly, he left Jamie in charge and drove out to the place in Splott where he had dropped Suzie off earlier that summer, after Kate Flynn’s party; miraculously he knew the way, didn’t make a single wrong turn, as if the little cottage in its close-nestled row behind overgrown gardens had lurked waiting for him all the time beneath his conscious thoughts. Shapes were silhouetted in the dusk-light against a clear sky like an eye stretched wide just before it shut; he could see that the wildness of the gardens, which he had remembered dense with foliage as miniature forests, only consisted in fact of broken sofas, concrete, buddleia, a fallen wall, a garage sunk under its weight of ivy. The fanlight above the front door through which Suzie had disappeared shone feebly yellow, as last time.

  Children still played out in the streets round here, as if they’d seen through the taming effects of PlayStation: a gang circled on bikes, shouting to one another, two boys to a bike, the front one standing to pedal, the one behind with his legs splayed wide; wheeling past they turned their heads, taking what might have been a sinister interest in him. He got out of the car and locked it behind him, scowling at the boys; then strode up the path, pushing through dense bristling shrubs that blocked his way. Of course there wasn’t a straightforward front-door bell, only a sellotaped-on note that said absurdly ‘Knock three times’: so he hammered with his fist, then both fists. When the door yielded and Neil stood warily, holding it half open, David pushed forward across the threshold.

  —I have to speak to my wife.

  Neil didn’t move from where he blocked the way. —She’s not here.

  —Suzie! David bellowed past him. —Suzanne!

  A female shape moved into the shadows where a door opened at the end of the hall (which was lit only by a dim bulb in a pink shade). Too slight for Suzie; he made out the pale oval of Menna’s face. —You don’t have any right to come bursting in here, she enunciated in cold condemnation; the South Walian in him discriminated vindictively against her adenoidal North Wales accent. David had never been in a fight in his whole life: he knew that he wouldn’t have a chance against Neil if it actually came to that. Neil was short and slim but wiry, he laboured all day out of doors, everything about him suggested the alert force of the capable male, kept decently in reserve. David pushed past him clumsily nonetheless: the little narrow hall, dreadfully wallp
apered, with pinned-up shawls and posters, was just as he would have imagined it, even down to its smell of dirty landlord’s carpet overlaid with incense.

  —Neil, said Menna. —Let him, if he wants to. We’ve got nothing to hide.

  —You can take our word for it, mate, said Neil, not offensively. —She isn’t here. We haven’t seen her for a week.

  David was sure immediately that they were telling the truth. Yet in a parade of angry expectation he had to storm about, searching, slamming open all the doors of the secretive little house; he even ran noisily upstairs, blundered into a bathroom whose walls were stencilled with flowers, switched on blaring central bulbs in two little den-bedrooms made for lamplight, draped with patchwork, scarves and beads, reflected in mirrors. More dignified than he was, they didn’t even follow him: Menna made a sign to Neil. Everywhere in the house was surprisingly neat, in its junk-shop way. Whatever he was looking for, it wasn’t here. Eventually he came to rest in their kitchen, breathing heavily, drooping, propped with his knuckles resting on the little table where they had been eating when he came pounding at their door: their soup, which looked like lentils, was getting cold in green pottery bowls (he remembered what he’d cooked for the children and felt reproached). He considered upsetting the soup bowls wildly onto the floor, but didn’t do it.

  —Then where is she?

  —If I did know I wouldn’t tell you, Menna said. —But to simplify matters, as it happens, I don’t. She must have been at Ladysmith today: why don’t you ask them? We haven’t seen her for a week. She doesn’t live here, you know: she’s just a friend. We don’t insist on knowing her whereabouts.

  —Then is there someone else?

  —Someone else? She mocked. —I don’t know what you mean.

  —She didn’t turn up at school today.

  Menna shrugged, but not without curiosity. —We’re not her keepers. Clearly you imagine you are.

  —I’m the father of her children, he said. —If she’s gone, I only want to know it.

  —If she’s gone, Menna said, —I’m not surprised.

  —What rubbish has she been telling you? What half-baked idea do you think you have, about our life?

  The following evening Suzie rang him in the middle of the after-supper clearing-up (pasta, with sauce out of a jar).

  —David, how dare you?

  —How dare I what? he said dully: even passion seemed to have reduced itself to drudgery. He had an apron tied around his waist; he had had a difficult day at work, too, and would be up until after midnight with bits and pieces he had to finish on the computer.

  —Go round and make a scene at my friends’ house.

  —Oh that. So they did know where you were.

  —No, I happened to phone them, they told me you’d been there: said you crashed around the house as if I was hidden in it somewhere. They thought it was just funny, but I was embarrassed for you.

  —So where are you?

  —I’m at Evie’s, for the moment.

  —All I want to know, he said, —is what to tell the kids. We’d better start to talk to them about it. We need to meet, to put this separation on a proper footing. And you ought to talk to Giulia, unless you’re throwing over your job along with everything else.

  —I don’t know if it’s a separation. Don’t talk to them yet.

  —As far as I can see: you’ve separated from us.

  —David: give me a bit more time? I’m not sure. And I have talked to Giulia. I’m going to go back to Ladysmith next week.

  —The children keep asking when you will be home.

  —I know. Don’t make me feel worse.

  —Why not?

  —I suppose I do see that you’ve got no reason not to.

  —What happened? he said. —Everything seemed to be all right. What was the matter?

  Her silence was substantial. —Wait, she made audible, at the end of a long effort. —Wait, please.

  After he put the phone down he returned to scraping plates and filling the dishwasher. At one point when he nudged the full rubbish bin out of his way with his foot, it tipped over, spilling out eggshells and bean tins and muck onto the floor. Then he kicked with all his weight at the door of the cupboard under the sink, so that his foot went right through its flimsy tongue-and-groove panelling, splintering it. The children and Jamie came running from the snug and stared at the hole.

  Kate settled down to her translating work. She tried to imagine this as the new shape of her days, sitting down every morning at her childhood desk with her books spread around her, turning on her computer. Perhaps the time had come for her to live more quietly. She felt as if she had shut a door behind her, anyway, on all her years teaching and researching at Queen Mary; she should have left earlier, before she grew so tired of it. There was no going back inside that world. While she worked she was gathering ideas for her introduction: she wanted to write about the particular qualities of Russian nineteenth-century pastoral, suggesting significant contrasts with Mickiewicz and the Polish tradition. Perhaps she should think more about that kind of writing, for the future. It wouldn’t be bad, to try and make a bit of a name for herself in some kind of literary journalism.

  While she was working one day Jamie telephoned, to ask what she was doing in the afternoon.

  —Impossible, I’m afraid, she said with the briskness she had adopted for all her relations with him that weren’t tender or sensual: it helped her demonstrate, for her honour, that they weren’t a real couple, connected in the ordinary atmosphere. —I’m taking Billie round for tea with a friend of hers.

  —Then come out to the café to meet me while she’s there.

  —I’m working. By myself, at home.

  —Come to the café, please. There’s a reason.

  Through Jamie’s boyishness and shyness she felt his force uneasily sometimes: he would become a man who expected his suggestions to be taken up. When Kate arrived at the café he was sitting with his back to the door, chatting across the table with a bent tall woman, her long aged face naked of make-up; a grizzled rope of dyed-red hair was pinned round above her brows, defiantly stylish in disregard of fashion, like her bright and clashingly red wool poncho. It only took Kate quick moments to recognise – in spite of a twenty-year gap since they’d last met – Francesca’s mother. Kate hadn’t gone to Francesca’s funeral, hadn’t been in London at the time (dragged transatlantic by a hectic affair with a Chicago professor), hadn’t known about the death even until Carol told her in a letter. Her last memory of Jane Bell was from graduation, when the gang had gone out to eat after the ceremony with parents disconcertingly along. Billie with her hair up, in her little Hardy Amies suit (older, always, than the other parents), had been a porcelain doll beside ugly flamboyant Jane, who smoked cigarillos and used the word ‘fuck’ loudly (not only for swearing but, more shocking, meaning sexual intercourse). Even in pink crumpled denim, hair home-cropped and dyed carrot-colour, bead earrings dangling, Jane had assumed possession of the restaurant and the waiters had deferred to her. She had taken Billie under her wing (London in those days made Billie shy), and Kate had resented Francesca for it. Francesca’s flame had burned sulkily around her mother’s brightness. Perhaps Billie and Jane commiserated over the times they’d had, bringing up difficult daughters.

  Jane’s eyes now, alert in her rather shockingly fallen face, registered Kate’s entrance benignly blankly, all her focus on the loved boy opposite. Her hunched shoulders and bent back (she’d always had a tall woman’s bad posture), straining forward, expressed the intensity with which she took him in. The bell above the café door clanged behind Kate and Jamie looked round anxiously, waved to her. She wouldn’t forgive him for springing this occasion on her; it was like his indifference to decorum. He was regretting it already, she could tell.

  —Granny, do you remember Kate?

  Jane Bell stared kindly enough, but she didn’t: how could she have seen that sour half-born girl, anyway, in a middle-aged woman? She put out
a big loose-skinned freckled hand.

  —One of Jamie’s teachers?

  —I would have liked to teach him, Kate said. —He’s supposed to be very clever.

  —He is. It’s all right, you know, for me to boast about him: it’s allowed to grandparents. He’s done very well in his A levels.

  —So I hear.

  —She’s Francesca’s friend, Granny. And Carol’s: they were all at UCL together.

  —Oh, Kate Flynn! said Jane, remembering at once and not squeamish at the opening of the past. —Of course. As you came through the door some familiarity did nudge me, but at my age I’m assailed by those all the time, I’ve learned to take no notice.

  —I wanted you to see her, Jamie said. —To see if you remembered.

  —Well, I do now. His grandmother smiled, at him: she too had that mouth with its loose louche lower lip.

  —We’ve been doing some extra reading together, Kate said.

  —He’s a nice boy, said Jane when he went to buy coffees.

  Kate was bland. —He is.

  —My heart’s treasure. At first because of Francesca; but actually it’s just him, we rub along, he and I. You’ve struck up contact through Carol, I suppose? I’m glad you’ve given him extra help. The college wasn’t very good: I offered to pay, but David’s delicate. One hates the private system, but what to do? I had the idea from Carol, though, that you were teaching in London somewhere.

  Kate explained lightly, holding as much of herself as possible back from notice. In the other woman’s face, its white skin dramatically puffy and marked as if out of a grand carelessness, she saw a puzzle of adjustment: Jane could not have expected her daughter’s contemporaries to have stayed twenty-six, but she was obviously disconcerted, picking up Kate’s life, not to feel that it was still all ahead of her. Kate had a chilly vision of herself on the slope down from summits that had hardly happened.

  —Is David all right? she asked Jane, while Jamie was paying at the counter. —Carol was worrying about him. Things seemed to be difficult at home.

  —I’m not staying there. I always stay with Bryn and Betty, the dears: we took to one another, in spite of everything. I do hope nothing’s wrong at David’s: I thought this time he’d chosen the right girl.