Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

Kate’s head was between the pedestal of the sink and the side of the old huge bath, still the same bath as in her childhood, old-fashioned even then, with claw feet, hideously stained inside. It was so old-fashioned that people were having these baths put back in now, their popularity had come around again. If she was going to live in this house, really come back to live here, then she must have the bathroom done up; have a shower put in, have everything made new, and modernised, and bearable. From this angle she could see horrors underneath the bath where the lino ended and Buckets and Mops gave up: shadowy shapes of hair and dust and lost things, an old tub of some extinct brand of scouring powder rolled on its side and forgotten. She could smell urine down here, for all the cleaning it had had: decades of drops and spills of urine, soaked into the lino, into the boards beneath.

At this point, Kate knew, she could stand up from the bathroom floor, dust herself down, run her wrists under the cold tap, think of this momentary collapse with lifesaving irony; walking out of the bathroom she could glance at her mother’s anxiety with blank impatience. ‘I have no idea what you’re fussing about. Aren’t I even allowed to use the toilet in peace?’ Even when she was a teenager she’d always known that this thing, this falling in to a new obsession, was something you did to yourself. You chose to abandon yourself to it. Always, given that choice, Kate had gone in deeper and deeper still, as if the disorder was life itself.

THROUGH HIS CLOSED eyelids David knew that his father was struggling into his bathing trunks under a towel tucked round his waist in the same routine he had held to for forty years; probably for fifty, sixty years, since whenever Bryn Roberts had grown out of being the lithe little boy who swam naked on this same Pembrokeshire beach with his gang of friends every summer holiday, when he came from Cardiff with his parents. These days the waist was expanded into a high assertive dome; they had a photo of him belly-to-belly with Suzie when she was pregnant with Joel. Bryn grunted with the difficulty of hopping on one leg while he changed, and although he still had broad muscled shoulders, the flesh had sunk on his breast, where the grey hair that used to sprout like wire grew soft and long: nonetheless, he insisted on swimming every day of their holiday if it wasn’t actually raining, even at Easter, when the sea’s cold was an iron blow. David didn’t open his eyes for the triumphal roar when the towel was whipped away, or the strong old man’s run into the sea, powering out and throwing himself dauntlessly upon the waves. The paddling children screamed at his splashing past; the women — his wife, his daughter, his daughter-in-law — applauded in mixed irony and admiration, the lifelong female accompaniment to his performance.

David’s awareness was buried in the dark behind his glowing lids, deeply absorbed in the sea’s rhythmic crash and drag: he was dozing and at the same time vividly awake to his situation. He dug his fingers into the secret cold of the sand with its grit of shell fragments, heard the tickling of tiny creatures moving at his ear, smelled the salty rot of weed on the rocks as the tide fell. The gulls’ calls seemed closer than the women’s talk, which was only another murmur like the shingle rolling against itself: Carol preoccupied with the barbecue improvised out of a baking tin and wire grill where she was cooking sausages for lunch, his mother watching the children over the top of her book, Suzie rubbing in suncream, rolling down the straps of her top, positioning herself to tan in the sudden unexpected spring sunshine. David sometimes felt he was coming awake for the first time, now he was forty: as if all the time that had been supposed to be his youth had passed in a muddled dream. He was surprised in those moments to find himself still connected to this collection of other people who filled the surface of his life and insisted that they knew him.

The children carried sloshing buckets of water up from the sea and Hannah marked out with her spade on the small horseshoe of sand that the falling tide exposed an overambitious square for a sandcastle. She began throwing up ramparts in a burst of energy; Joel, impressed, followed scooping and patting obediently in her wake. They squatted to repair the slipping walls, then lay on their bellies kicking their feet, reaching their skinny arms to make two tunnels that would meet underneath: David remembered the slightly sinister success, meeting eventually other fingers under the surface, alive as your own, grappling abrasively. After lunch he swam, surprising himself, tiring himself, far out, farther than Bryn had gone. He turned and bobbed in the rocking sea to look back at the small shingly beach, scooped out of black rocks crusty with barnacles and limpets, where he could only just make out his family; behind it was the square austere stone house on the Parrog, with its roof of thick old purple-blue slates, and its sloping front garden where tough seagrasses grew behind the walls built of some rough cement-like mix of shells and pebbles. It had been Betty’s parents’ home once, and now Bryn and Betty kept it on for holidays, for the family, for the grandchildren.

Only Jamie wasn’t with them; he had stayed in Cardiff, saying he had work to do. David was relieved to be free of his adolescent son’s presence, his long lope, his silences, the signs of his corrosive boredom. In the middle of a conversation or a family joke he would sometimes get up and walk away, leaving them to the spoiled end of it. It would be easier for them all when he went away to university next year.

Carol could imagine how insufferably solid the phalanx of their family might seem, concentrated in belonging in the old house. In Suzie’s face that seemed at first sight so frankly open — its pale full mouth, the faint freckles that came right to the edges of her lips, the sandy-lashed blue eyes resting steadily on whoever was talking — there were if you watched for them signs of an unexpected wincing awareness. Bryn, who had been a general practitioner for forty years, had not lost in his retirement the habit of confident benevolence; Suzie blinked and smiled, caught in the bright stream of it, withholding her own thoughts as if she hung onto stones in her pockets. She was more carefully tactful, Carol decided, than Betty — who had been tactful all her life — ever quite noticed; Suzie deferred subtly to her mother-in-law when they cooked together in the inconvenient old kitchen, whose Rayburn stove had to be coaxed and propitiated by an expert. Sometimes when Suzie was in the room Betty spoke to Carol in Welsh; Carol would only answer her in English.

In the evenings, when the children were in bed, the family played solo whist around the rickety green baize card table (Betty’s parents would never have allowed cards). Suzie didn’t know how to play and wouldn’t learn; she sat in their grandfather’s big chair with her feet tucked under her, biting her hangnails and reading her book, some self-help thing. The old musty pungency of flagstones laid on an earth floor had survived the redecorating of the high plain rooms and the new furniture bought to make the place more comfortable, and still brought on Carol’s asthma; the tall clock still ticked although it wouldn’t keep the time. They had a log fire in the grate, because after the fine days the evenings were sharp. David wasn’t concentrating and lost two good solo hands. When the card players took a break for Betty to make hot drinks, Carol and Suzie went outside together to look at the sea. They leaned on the wall of the little stone quay; a fat gibbous moon, dark pearly white, hung low above the horizon; the black water breathed coldly in and out.