The Master Bedroom

by Tessa Hadley

—Of course you do.

  —And that, this way, I’m free.

  —You are free.

  She lay down under the duvet and closed her eyes.

  —Would you like the light out?

  —No, leave it on please. I feel too afraid of the dark.

  She knew through her closed lids that, lingering, he stared down; taking in the surprise of her there, between his sheets.

  —Will you stay with me? she asked. —I don’t want to be alone.

  Perceptibly he hesitated over what she meant, then sat heavily down, not wanting to mistake, on her side of the bed. —Of course I will. When she put her hand out to him, he took it eagerly in both of his; she lost herself in the cool hollow of his grip. He brushed the bristle of her rings with his blunt finger-ends, as if he was reading Braille.

  —Don’t you want to take these off? Aren’t they too heavy?

  When she didn’t answer he pulled at the rings one by one, twisting them off, dropping them with a chink on the glass top of the bedside cabinet, until her hand was naked inside his (apart from one old silver ring that was too tight, from her teenage years). For a few long minutes – before the sleeping tablets and her exhaustion and shock kicked in, obliterating everything – longing for him surged in her, as if her spirit craned out of her body towards his. But she didn’t make a move. Neither of them, under the circumstances, made a move.

  When she woke it was morning. She couldn’t remember the last time she had slept all through the night. David, also in his clothes – he had at least taken off his jacket – was under the duvet beside her, with his back turned. As soon as she started to get out of bed to find the bathroom, he sat up anxiously.

  —So, she said, —we finally slept together.

  He wasn’t the type to find that funny, and blinked at her, bemused, creases from his pillow pressed into his cheek; roused if not out of sleep then out of some deep trance of reverie.

  —Did you mind? I didn’t want to leave you alone, but it got cold, I kept nodding off.

  —Don’t be silly. It’s your bed anyway.

  His hair was stuck up comically behind one ear: he had let it grow rather long recently, so that it was less stiff and neat. Kate used the en suite bathroom, closing the door discreetly. She washed her face, borrowed a toothbrush, smoothed at her crumpled clothes, stared at herself short-sightedly – horrible, probably – in the mirror where Suzie his wife must have looked a thousand times. She used Suzie’s soap too, and noted her shower gel. It was strange, not to have to go to the hospital. The shape bereavement would take was unknown to her as yet, she felt she only circled it in trepidation; it waited like a new place for her to move inside. This morning she had a sense of the completed arc of her mother’s whole life that was almost visionary and exulting, relieved: but no doubt that would not be the last of it.

  David had put on his shoes, sitting on the side of his bed, though he hadn’t flattened his hair; when she came out from the bathroom he stood up urgently. Putting on her rings, fastening her watch, she held him at bay, never looking quite at him: without her lenses he was blurred anyway.

  —I’ve got a busy day ahead, she said. —What time is it? Strangely, now it’s over, there are all sorts of things I have to do. I think I’ll leave my car in the hospital car park for ever: I can’t afford to pay the ticket. You know, Billie and I never talked – isn’t that awful? – about whether she wanted a Jewish funeral or not. Well, we talked, but she never decided. They were so beastly to her, you know, when she married my father. What shall I do? I’d better ask her friends. I said to her that I did want a Jewish one, for the drama, the rending of the garments: remember that, won’t you, if I go first? There’s no one else to remember for me now. Or, if that lot won’t have me, then at least the resurrection and the life and so on. No humanist namby-pamby, please: everyone choosing the wrong poems and reading out bits of their own creative writing. How grim would that be?

  She picked up her shoes and swung them by the straps, looking round for somewhere to sit and put them on; seizing her by the arms, he tried to look into her face.

  —Kate, I have to tell you what I feel. I know there couldn’t be a worse time.

  —Oh no: don’t tell me, please, not now! Not today.

  —You can see my marriage has fallen apart. You were going to say to the ambulance men that day that I was your brother. Is that what you really want?

  She rocked on her stockinged feet in her distress, pulling away from him: it was almost a scuffle. —I don’t want you to make me decide this.

  —Isn’t it possible, he persisted doggedly, —that I could be something else?

  —I don’t know.

  —After last night I feel it, I feel that it’s possible.

  —Anything’s possible. Aren’t we the generation that decided nothing – nothing of this sort – was impossible?

  —So what’s that you’re saying? I’m stupid, I know, but I have to be very clear. Yes or no?

  —I don’t know. Wait. Yes, maybe.

  —All right, he said, subsiding, unsatisfied, not trying – as she half expected, half wanted him to do – to kiss her. —That’ll do for the moment.

  —All right, she said. —Wait. Yes, maybe. We’ll see. Why not?

  And he let her go.

  Days later – how many, she couldn’t count – Kate met Jamie in a pub one afternoon. She arrived wearing dark glasses, a dark scarf wrapped round her hair: outward signs of the state she was in. Her mother’s funeral (Jewish after all) had been unexpectedly terrifying; she felt panic and a cold excitement at her liberation, her future as unknowable as if it was a blank. All through Billie’s illness and since she’d died, Kate had forbidden Jamie to come near her: when he had turned up once at the door she had not let him in. His father, instead, had spent a couple of evenings at Firenze when Suzie was home with the children, helping Kate sort practicalities, mostly to do with Billie’s money. (‘I don’t suppose you ever paid tax,’ he had said with concern, ‘on all these large sums she made over to you?’)

  David was the model of restraint, he held off as she had made him understand he must, waiting for her word. She did not let him see the noisy grief she gave in to a few times because it seemed disproportionate to the quiet fact of Billie’s death, he might have thought she was putting it on. At work David was helping to oversee the preparations for vaccine development, in case of an influenza pandemic.

  —There isn’t a vaccine yet, of course, because there isn’t a virus. But there are things we can do to be ready to make it.

  —Will we all die? Kate asked with curiosity.

  —Don’t be silly. We don’t even know for sure if it will happen, although it probably will. If it does, there will be some increased mortality.

  —‘Some increased mortality’. The way you say that. We will be in your hands.

  —Not just mine, luckily.

  All the time David was in her house Kate had known that Jamie might turn up; meeting him at the pub, she almost invited discovery (it was a place that she knew Carol liked, for instance). That was her bargain with hope, in exchange for what she’d done: she wouldn’t confess, but she wouldn’t make any effort to conceal it either. The pub at two o’clock bled coloured light from its windows into the windy corner where two long terraces, blowing with litter, bleakly met. Jamie was already halfway down his pint because she was late; she was probably late enough for it to be his second one. Pausing at the pub door – dramatically, wound in her black scarf: people stared – she took him in before he saw her. If she hadn’t known different things about him, he might have been a boy among the others in here, rowdy and joshing at their table, drinking to get drunk, comradely competitive. As he waited, for all his visibly anxious expectancy, he even cast an eye up at the sport (rugby?) showing on a big screen high on the wall. Seeing her, he rose responsibly to his feet: tall, intent, hair pushed behind his ears, straight nose skewed poignantly off-centre. She wound between the backs crowded round tables
laden with glasses and bottles, towards where he’d kept a seat for her in a corner.

  He loomed over her clumsily; forbidden to touch her, he didn’t know what to do with his hands. —I’ve really wanted to see you.

  —Will you buy me a drink, now I’m here? Have you got money?

  He jangled coins in the pocket of his crumpled khaki zip-up jacket, setting off for the bar, forgetting at first to ask her what she wanted.

  —You really have to sort out, she said when he brought her whisky, —what subject you want to do at university. You have to get your applications in, for next year.

  He wondered. —That was what you wanted to talk about?

  —After the awful mess I’ve made, I owe you one useful thing at least: some good career advice.

  He stared into his beer. —That’s all?

  —That’s the mistake I made at your age – thinking that all that really mattered was the personal stuff. If you’re not careful, you build your life around smoke.

  —It’s the rest that’s smoke.

  —Anyway, this – between us – doesn’t even count as personal life. It was just an accident that happened. Talking of smoke, I’ve given up. At the hospital I couldn’t, and since, I haven’t wanted to. Isn’t that incredible, after all these years?

  —You’ve brought me here to get rid of me, he said. —I knew I shouldn’t come. I wanted to meet you at the house, not in this crowd.

  —It couldn’t make any difference wherever we met.

  He gulped at his beer and grew visibly drunker, his focus thickening. —I know you better than you think I do.

  —You know one of the worst things about me that there is to know.

  Dents of embittered concentration appeared in his cheeks. —Is that what you think it was? Didn’t you like it at all, then?

  —If you’re fishing for me to tell you how good you are, that women will love you . . .

  —I don’t want other women.

  —You just don’t know yet that you do.

  —You don’t know how I feel.

  —Well, that’s true. Because of our age difference, do you think, or because I haven’t tried? Would you like more beer?

  —No. This is my fourth. If you’re interested, I have decided on a course to apply to. In Edinburgh.

  —Edinburgh! That’s a good idea. I can imagine you acquiring the necessary northern sceptical rigour.

  —To do Classics, with Arabic.

  Kate had to think about it. —You see: you are exceptional. Of course that’s the right thing, a brilliant mix. You can go into the Foreign Office. You’ll be an ambassador.

  —Don’t exaggerate, he said.

  —Think how you’d have grown to hate my exaggerating, over time.

  —I can’t.

  Kate hadn’t touched her whisky: she dipped the edges of the beer mats in little pools of spilled beer. They were both leaning with their chins in their hands, elbows on the table, heads close together, the conversation an intimate rumble kept from everyone around. She imagined people thinking she was an aunt with her nephew.

  —I want it to be as if this thing hadn’t happened, she said. —That’s what I came to ask you for. Not as a figure of speech, but actually: I want it to disappear.

  —What are you talking about?

  —It’s possible, trust me. I used to think what you probably think: that everything we do endures, has consequences. But really, bits can disappear. We decide what happened and what didn’t. Whole pieces of our selves float off, they aren’t kept anywhere.

  —No.

  —There are reasons for me asking you this, complications. I will tell you what they are. Also, by the way, you have to promise me not to do anything silly.

  He was uncomprehending for a moment. —You mean, that I won’t kill myself?

  —But I think you’re more like your grandmother than your mother. She’s an endurer.

  —She did find some of my mother’s poems, I meant to tell you. She had them all cut out, in a scrapbook.

  —Oh: are they any good?

  —I don’t know. Yellowed: clipped out on pieces of yellowed newspaper.

  —Poems do yellow.

  —I haven’t found a way of getting into them yet. It’s like a code: I don’t know what anything stands for.

  —Will you try, acting just as if all this hadn’t happened?

  Blearily, he rubbed his face. —It’s not possible. But I’ll think about it, on one condition.

  —What’s that?

  —That you let me come back to the house, now.

  —Come back to the house? Is that a euphemism? Because I just couldn’t.

  —Just for another half an hour, to talk to you. Not with all these people watching. Then I’ll do what you ask. I’ll try.

  —All right. We’ll go back to the house. An hour. Can you walk straight? It’s windy outside.

  —It’ll sober me up. You haven’t drunk your whisky.

  —I don’t want it.

  David watched a young silver birch, still with its full skirt of yellow leaves, blown sideways by the wind outside his office window. The sky was mostly heavily grey, but the straining dancing leaves and long whips of twigs were dazzlingly black against a swell of light. With every strong burst of wind the leaves were dragged inside out, clouds of them were carried off. Joanne of the administrative staff sat with her back to the window, but turned nervously around every so often to look; she was collating for David the results of a questionnaire sent round to health authorities. She confided that she hated the wind; she didn’t mind the rain, but if it was windy at night she could never sleep. David, though, was exhilarated by the contrast between the purposeful peace within, the steady light and subdued thudding of their keyboards, and the ecstatic scene outside: impossible to know if it was assault or pleasuring. At four, an hour before he had meant to finish, he got up from his desk. It was time to insist, with Kate. The violence of his feelings reassured him: he had never been so forceful in love before. He was pleased to surprise Joanne, uncharacteristically leaving their work unfinished.

  He drove the route that was beginning to be familiar as his own, up to Firenze; Kate wasn’t expecting him, he hadn’t said he’d call. The trees in the park were rowdy, the wind blew dark gusts of birds and leaves indistinguishably into the road in the last light. When he parked in the side street opposite the gate, then crossed to the house, David was surprised to see the front door standing a few inches open. He hesitated, pushed at it and went inside: the wind’s ceasing in his ears was like a drop into a different element. He breathed the musty air of the porch; no one had put the lights on in the house, but he thought he heard voices somewhere. In the dark he blundered, stepping into the hall, but not noisily; he opened his mouth to call, but couldn’t bring himself to break the hush, and closed his mouth again. A note sounded on the piano, and then a different one: not as if someone was going to play, but as if they touched the keys with their thoughts elsewhere, punctuating a conversation. Under David’s feet little squares of black and white tile stirred where they had come loose from the floor.

  The murmuring voices didn’t resolve, as he drew nearer, into chat: he had thought it might be his sister visiting. Perhaps it was consolation of a mourning daughter that he listened to, straining his attention, stricken with dismay at himself (he had never eavesdropped in his life). Or could these be intruders, leaving the door so sinisterly open behind them; ought he to surprise them and chase them off? He had said to Kate that she was careless, that she needed mortise locks on the doors, if not an alarm. But the exchange was too soulful for thieves, the voices were too rich with feeling, they ran in his mind like a score, he followed their rise and fall, their rests. There was no doubt, as he grew used to them: some male voice mingled with Kate’s. And if anything, it was she who was consoling, the other who complained and pleaded. David knew he had no right to be here. Then out of the not-quite-decipherable music a phrase detached itself with emphasis, as if whoever spo
ke it drew at that point further off from Kate. He also struck another, lower, note on the piano.

  —I know who it is, the voice said. —Don’t think I don’t know who it is.

  Kate didn’t answer, but she must have moved because David heard her heels loud on the parquet, and then a lamp clicked on inside the room. The configuration of everything loomed out of the darkness, and David was appalled to find himself half crouched near the open drawing-room door. He fled, knocking into something on his way: an umbrella stand. Who these days had an umbrella stand? Idiotically, he had time for the thought that there were probably umbrellas in it that hadn’t been opened in the rain for thirty years. He heard Kate’s voice then distinctly, raised to a new sharpness out of its murmuring.

  —Who was that?

  Someone replied, but he didn’t wait to hear.

  He waited outside in the car: he couldn’t have said how long he waited, nor what he was waiting for. But by the time Firenze’s front door banged shut – out of sight, behind the turn in the drive where the house was hidden by the monkey-puzzle tree – he knew who he was expecting to come out. He thought he might have seen, when the light in the drawing room came on, a crumpled khaki jacket thrown untidily down, sleeves half inside out as usual, onto the oak chest in Kate’s hall: its familiarity so unconsidered that at first it had hardly seemed to mean anything. Anyway, hadn’t he heard the voice?

  It was dark: but Jamie, exiting between the brick gateposts, the jacket slung over one shoulder, saw him waiting in the light from the street lamp. He hesitated, but not as if the sight of his father was a surprise; then he crossed over to the car. David stayed sitting in the driver’s seat; Jamie came close and leaned against the car heavily on his side – one arm tensed against the car bonnet, the other against its roof, as if he wanted to push it over – staring down through the windscreen. If Jamie had made any gesture for him to do it, David would have wound the window down: instead they contemplated one another through the glass. The boy was distressed: David didn’t know what emotion he showed himself, he had an idea that they reflected one another, that whatever he saw on Jamie’s face was his own feeling – only Jamie’s hair was blown about by the wind whereas inside the car everything was stale and still. Then Jamie pulled himself upright away from the car and walked off.