Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

— I remember now. You were very importunate. I couldn’t think why it was you wanted me to choose your reading for you, so I just picked up the nearest thing. I did have a suspicion, afterwards. But I’m so sorry. It was awful of me, wasn’t it? Can you forgive me? It is Polish. I’ll find you something else. If you haven’t gone off the whole idea.

— I don’t know where to begin, that’s all.

— It’s rather touching, in your middle age, that you’re ready to ‘begin’. Like one of those adult baptisms: grocers and insurance clerks in white sheets, dunked in midwinter ponds.

David was disconcerted that she thought him middle-aged.

— Aren’t we? Aren’t you forty? Isn’t that in the middle somewhere? I never really know how old I feel. Sometimes I think it’s all hardly started; sometimes I feel jaded as some mummified immortal. You’re much better balanced, aren’t you? You seem to know who you are.

David turned his empty teacup upside down, frowning, interrogating himself. — I suppose that outwardly.

— Outwardly’s good. Don’t hesitate, don’t tell me that you’re not balanced, not yet. I’m liking to think of you as terribly steady. Billie, don’t eat more biscuits, they’re not good for you.

— I’m hungry, dear. What is for dinner?

— Hungry again already? Surely we’ve only just had lunch? Let me get you out of your coat now it’s warmed up in here.

The old lady stood up and let herself be pulled about; unwound from her bulky outer layers, she seemed doll-sized. Underneath she was dressed in something lemon-yellow.

— Kate’s looking after me so wonderfully. You know she’s a brilliant girl? Her professor — I forget which one — said to me at her graduation: ‘Do you know what we’ve got here, Mrs Flynn? She’s something special.’ We have to take great, great care of her, he said.

— Shut up, Mummy. Really, shut up. That professor’s died since; and nothing came of all my youthful promise. It’s too sad.

— It’s her temperament, Mrs Flynn whispered confidentially to David. — She has it from her father. He was Irish. He was a brilliant man, too: a violinist.

— Billie’s an absolute believer, when it comes to brilliance. She believes in other lovely things too, like civilisation and progress.

— As far as it goes, David said, — I’m a believer in progress. Is that so ridiculous?

— I suppose you’d have to be, in your line of work.

— Sewage and inoculations and sanitary housing: aren’t these good things?

— I know what: you should read Madame Bovary , that can be your first assignment. For the purest contempt ever for the idea of progress. Only I’ll think less of you if you’re not at least half persuaded. One mustn’t read like a prig, you know.

David wondered if Kate thought he was a prig.

— And you have to buy your own copy, I won’t lend you one. You can get it for three-and-sixpence, anywhere. If you can’t read French the translations are all equally bad.

He found himself somehow telling her, although he hadn’t meant to go into so much detail, about John Snow and his researches into cholera at the Broad Street pump, and the beginnings of a scientific epidemiology; Mrs Flynn followed smilingly with every indication of deep interest. He wanted to communicate to Kate his passion for a certain tradition of pragmatic progressivism: gradual unromantic improvements in people’s daily lives.

— I don’t know how to live in this house, Kate said to him earnestly, suddenly. — Doesn’t that sound strange? I lived here for all my childhood, I’ve come back almost every other weekend for years. But I don’t know how to make my mark on it. It’s as if all the years I’ve been away haven’t happened.

David looked around the room, trying to be helpful. — Why don’t you move in more of your own stuff?

— I’m not complaining. In a way I’m quite enjoying the sensation. One gets so tired, of one’s own mark; hearing oneself work through the same old performance. It’s nice — for instance — to meet you again, for a change. You’re very restful, after some of my friends.

She felt for a cigarette in a packet on the mantelpiece, scrutinising herself frankly, frowning, in the rectangular gilt mirror. — Where did I put the matches? People buy me those kind of sexy silver lighters that I love, but I lose them infallibly.

He stood up and found the matches; he didn’t think to gallantly light her cigarette for her until it was too late.

— I ought to go, he said, addressing her in the mirror. Tarnish blotched it like a black lichen spreading from its corners. Her reflection, unsmiling, was more tentative than she was in the real air. — You find my enthusiasm boring.

She reassured him, shaking her earrings, tilting her head to blow her smoke away from him. — Not boring: it’s romantic. We sceptics only long to be contradicted.

— Oh well. Perhaps we enthusiasts long for that too.

— I hadn’t thought of that.

— Oh no. Oh no! Kate groaned aloud to herself as soon as she’d shut the front door behind David. — Oh no, not this.

She stood with her back to the door, gripping the cold metal doorknob in one clenched hand, pressing herself painfully against where the letter box was fixed inside with two protruding screws.

— Not this, I can’t bear it.

— Kate? What’s the matter? came her mother’s voice from where she was sitting in the drawing room, obediently where Kate had left her.

— Nothing! Stay there!

She had watched David make his way down the path to the gate, hunching his shoulders under his coat against the rain. If she made an effort she could still just imagine seeing him impartially, casually: good-looking enough, absorbed in himself in a way that didn’t promise well, limited, earnest. He didn’t turn round to wave at the gate. Probably in a crisis, confronted with raw emotion, with anything improper, he would react with caution: he would show a superficial kindness and underneath it deep distaste. There were bolts of killing disapproval locked up under the thick pelt of his hair, and in the brown steady gaze that followed her conversation with only the slightest hint of lumbering. He was dangerous to her. She must use all her experience to guard herself against him, against the cold look of disassociation he was capable of turning on her at any time.

— Kate? What are you doing?

Sometimes this intimacy of shared life made it seem as if her mother lived and moved inside her skull. The creakings of Firenze were familiar as a childhood language; she heard Billie getting up from her chair.

— I’m doing nothing. I’m just standing here.

She hurried upstairs and locked the bathroom door behind her, then sat down on the closed toilet lid, doubled over, holding her stomach. How had this happened? At what moment precisely had she allowed this longing inside to devour her? She saw David’s face, wide and heart-shaped; his skin that in middle age had grown thick and resilient, with tough beard-growth kept cleanly shaved. She could still smell his soap, and the warmth that flowed from him, reassuring as toast; the idea of his serious conservatism melted her, made her weak. From behind his expression cloudy with self-preoccupation, his smile flashed unexpectedly crooked: he was more responsive than he knew, he was capable of intensities he hadn’t tasted.

— I’m too old for this, she said aloud. — It will kill me this time.

— Kate? Her mother rattled the doorknob: she had pulled herself all the way up the stairs, guessing at a crisis even in her confusion. — What are you doing in there? What’s going on?

— Go away. Leave me alone.

She ought to be back at work, she ought be keeping herself busy, keeping herself stupid and numb. This was what had always happened to women when they had too much time to think: they made themselves conduits to all the passions in the universe, they dreamed open all the possibilities that sane hard-working people kept shut away. She lay down on her back on the floor, on the ancient lino whose pattern of black lines and pink and white rhomboids was worn almost to whiteness in places. She knew she had done this sometime before, in the far-off past, in the thick of her teenage excesses. Her mother had been outside the door then, too, rattling the handle, begging to come in, pleading to know what was happening.