Tessa Hadley: The Master Bedroom

— He’s a very nice young man, isn’t he? How do we know him?

Kate had always spoken to her mother sharply. When she was a child she’d hit her too, and bitten her: Billie had talked about her temper as if it was a force of nature, magnificent and inevitable, which had made Kate ashamed. When Kate was older, she and her mother had had grand shouting matches; they had also told each other everything. In truth, the quarrelling hadn’t got any worse since Billie had been ill. But Kate knew other people would be shocked that she swore at her mother and raised her voice. She was occasionally shocked at it herself. Sometimes she pushed at her mother in exasperation, she smacked her legs when she was trying to help her get her shoes on.

Filling her mother’s hot-water bottle, she reflected grimly that David Roberts tonight would have taken away a charming impression of both of them, the eccentric pair in the house of culture and music. He had insisted on borrowing a book, so in the end she snatched up something from one of the piles on a table and pushed it at him, to get rid of him: something in a green binding, God knows what, probably some collection of poems in Polish.

IN LATE MARCH, when it was supposed to be spring, there was a fall of snow. Kate opened the back door last thing at night and Sim ran high-stepping into the kitchen, affronted, with spots of it on his fur; the next morning all the flowerpots in the garden, empty for years, wore white caps. It didn’t last even twenty-four hours. The sun shone weakly and the air was busy all day with a persistent ticking of melt water; on the roof the softening snow slid about. Big drops plummeted past the windows while Kate rehearsed Schubert in the drawing room with the quartet she’d managed to get together. Even the birds’ cheeping sounded liquified.

That afternoon Billie drove the dented Citroën down to the shops as usual, at a cautious fifteen miles per hour. They parked illegally outside the leisure centre at the bottom of the park, beside the library, in a spot they already thought of as their own, so that they were indignant if anyone had taken it; then picked their way through brown watery slush to the café, whose customers had tramped the slush inside. Their entrance was always conspicuous; everything had to wait, as if for royalty, for Billie with her stick and her gracious unseeing smile. The staff — girls and boys with piercings, pink- and blue-dyed hair, bared midriffs even in this weather — knew what they wanted before they asked: Kate always had black coffee, Billie hot chocolate and shortbread. Billie had developed a new greed for sweet things; effusively she thanked whoever brought them, calling them all Jenny and Polly whatever their gender. The newish existence of this particular café among the shops of the suburb had drawn out — from shabby Victorian and Edwardian residential streets, and a mix of white and Bengali families, and students, and solitaries either interesting or mad — the appearance of a little community. There were exhibitions of local artists on the café walls, along with posters advertising drum ’n’ bass, yoga classes, online creative writing groups.

On the way back from fetching extra sugar for Billie, Kate was brought up short by a boy at the next table: she was certain that she knew him. One of her ex-students? She was used to the passage across her life of more or less golden boys and girls. The face — wide, with rich creamy skin and deep hooded eyelids, long coppery-brown hair pushed behind his ears — seemed too strongly significant. Guessing, smiling tentatively, she balanced her sugar packets by the corner on the edge of his table.

— Are you David Roberts’ son?

She hadn’t been interested in him, after what David said: she’d pictured him in one of those unflattering biking helmets, absorbed in dreary self-punishing tests of physical prowess. He had to struggle to draw himself out of that raptness in which the young relate to one another; there were three others at the table, boys and a girl. She saw them register her middle age.

— I suppose I am.

— But you don’t look very like him. You’re like Francesca, aren’t you?

He wasn’t at all what she had carelessly imagined: at the mention of his mother his expression opened up, complex and conscious. He half stood up from his chair.

— Did you know her?

— She was my friend at college. And I’m a friend still of Carol’s.

— OK, that’s cool. I don’t know many people who remember her. Apart from Auntie Carol. And my grandmother, of course.

— Is that Francesca’s redoubtable mother? I haven’t heard of her for years.

— She’s pretty amazing. Yeah, she’s doing really well. Do you live here?

— I’ve lived in London for years. But I’ve moved back. I grew up here.

— I wouldn’t move back, one of the boys said: freckled and ginger, thickset.

Kate conceded. — You’re eager to be gone. But that’s how it is. Like being born: can’t wait to get out, spend the rest of your life trying to get back in.

Kate could amuse these young ones; what else had she got out of all those years of teaching? Teaching gave one a better idea of how to talk to them; mothers especially found themselves trapped inside that awful jollying, explaining voice. She smiled around the table and took in without a flicker that the girl was pretty, brown-skinned, possibly Iranian, with long eyes whose stiff black lashes were like kohl-lines. Probably she was Jamie’s girlfriend, or if she wasn’t, wanted to be. Weren’t girls still made like that? Or perhaps all she daydreamed about was becoming an investment manager, or a dentist.

— And you’re in the sixth form, Jamie? You are Jamie, aren’t you? Are you bright? What’s your subject?

— He’s bright, said the girl, proudly envious.

Jamie grimaced as if it wasn’t worth discussing. — I don’t know if I have a subject yet. I don’t know if it’s English or Philosophy.

— Do English, Kate said, unhesitating. — Why waste your life learning clever ways to redescribe what everybody already knows? Art’s much more complicated.

He smiled warily. — I’d like to talk to you about my mother sometime. If you didn’t mind. I’d like to find out more about her.

— Is this Francesca your mother? the girl said, astonished: so, he hadn’t allowed her far inside his privacy.

— I wouldn’t be a reliable witness, Kate demurred. — We knew each other when we weren’t much older than you are now. It’s a long time ago. I’ll only remember funny bits and pieces.

— I’d like the funny bits and pieces, I think.

She gave him her telephone number then, and told him how to find the house, the name in black and gold letters painted on the fanlight over the door.

— You could cycle over. Your father said you were interested in bikes. He and I bumped into one another at the Millennium Centre.

Jamie laughed. — He has no idea. I go everywhere on my bike; but I’m not interested in it.

Kate wouldn’t have minded him in one of her classes: a Tolstoy type, not a Dostoevsky type, who were two-a-penny. But Billie was waiting patiently for her sugar; and in all the ceremonial fuss of stirring her chocolate and tucking a paper napkin into the white Peter Pan collar of her dress, Kate wouldn’t even have noticed the young people leave, if Jamie hadn’t raised a hand in farewell to her through the window, straddled already half across his bicycle, hopping on one leg. She saw for herself then how shabby and ancient it was, not even a racing model (and that he didn’t wear a helmet). She thought that probably he wouldn’t ever turn up at Firenze. He’d be protective, on second thoughts, of his own idea of Francesca; which probably, considering some of the things Kate remembered about her, would be a good thing.