Tessa Hadley - The Master Bedroom

Suzie pulled her cardigan tight around her shoulders. — Do you believe in life after death? she said out of nowhere.

— Golly. Even when I was a Christian, I was never able to persuade myself. I could only believe in the ‘how to live’ bits of it, not the magic. I’m so boringly rational.

— Were you a Christian? I suppose you were brought up as one.

— For ages. Until I was thirteen or so, and fell in with wicked friends.

— I’ve always been so solidly sure there wasn’t anything, it never seemed a problem. Now there are presences: I feel them, I’m sure I feel them.

— Presences?

— As if everything’s come alive. But not exactly in a benevolent way. Not evil either. Restless.

— Oh, said Carol kindly, sorry that she couldn’t take this seriously: her own instincts were so exclusively earthly. — In the house here, it’s obvious that my grandparents are present in some sense, because we still have their things, it’s their place, we’re remembering them all the time while we’re here. But that’s all.

— Not that. More active than that. Like a pressure: with messages. As if the way we live is all wrong, sealed up in ourselves: but underneath the skin of things, there’s a whole world of interconnections and meaning.

— OK, that makes some sort of sense.

— You think that the people who believe this stuff are all half daft and gullible, with crystals and tarot cards and things. But actually there are friends of mine, a new friend of mine from school, who really does seem to have some sort of gift, yet she doesn’t make any fuss about it. Quietly and calmly, she reads your mind. She takes away my headaches, just touching me on the temple. She talks about spirits as if they were the most ordinary thing, around us everywhere.

— I don’t know if I’d be comfortable with that.

— That’s what I would have thought too.

Separated by their difference, vague to one another in the darkness, they stayed on, listening to the sea.

— Don’t mention to David that we talked about this, Suzie said.

— Of course not, if you don’t want me to.

— He freezes up if I even try to talk to him about anything that isn’t just material and practical. I don’t mind him not believing in it. But he seems disgusted that anyone could ever think differently.

— Oh dear, said Carol. — It’s true, I suppose, he can be a bit inflexible.

David’s son came to Firenze twice before Kate could find time to talk to him. She had made up her mind, if she thought about him at all, that he wouldn’t turn up; and the first time when she opened the door to him — it was an awkward moment, she was on the phone to Max over some practicality to do with the appalling people renting her London flat (in her naivety she’d imagined that boring meant undemanding) — she half pretended she didn’t recognise him. He must have seen her crumple up carelessly in her hand the piece of paper he gave her with his mobile number, meaning to lose it. That had been a grey windless joyless day, she had been full with her idiotic troubles; the sight of Jamie, who was like David whom she was hoping for, but was not David, had seemed an exotically cruel turn of the knife. David had called twice more since he brought back the Polish book. He talked, she had drawn him out. Scrupulously coolly, she had held back any signs of what she felt, then suffered for it afterwards. What if he didn’t come again?

When Jamie called the second time she was rehearsing with the quartet, so that she arrived at the door where he stood with his bike — in sunshine this time — with her violin in her hand and a carelessly expectant sociability, thinking he was going to be the clarinettist who wanted to play with them. Behind her trailed impatient ends of music and laughing voices (dark note from the lugubrious cello). Jamie peered past her shoulder, longing visibly to be asked inside; Kate saw that he was calling now because he was curious about her, as well as interested in his mother. She said that she couldn’t talk to him that afternoon, but that she would meet him the week following, in the café where she’d first seen him. She almost forgot the appointment but didn’t quite; and what’s more, she arranged to pay the Buckets and Mops lady, whose name was Alison, to stay an extra hour and sit with Billie, because Billie in the café took up all her attention, and if she was to do her duty by the boy then she ought to concentrate — at least for this short half an hour, after all this time — on Francesca.

The park, on her way to meet him, displayed all the delicate first dazzle of spring: fresh yellow-green leaves the crumpled limp texture of kid shaken out of the hoary old branches; red slips of new growth sprouting on grizzled standard roses. The first rowing boats of the new season were out on the lake. The great magnolia that shaded the herbaceous border was fat with waxy buds still tightly pink; later, they would open to cream. Kate remembered as she walked her old rage at Francesca, who had been so tall, so indifferent, so English; now the poor old dead had faded and gone out of fashion whether they liked it or not. She had chosen carefully clothes appropriate to the meeting with Francesca’s son: a green dress, slightly Audrey Hepburn; her cream jacket with the big jet buttons; sunglasses. She was late, of course, and the boy had probably already decided she wasn’t coming, although she admired him for sitting absorbed nonetheless in his thoughts and not giving away any signs of the shame of being forgotten: at his age Kate would have been agonised, and long gone. He had his mother’s full loose lower lip, which Kate had forgotten until she saw him. It made their smiles slippery and equivocal.

— Remind me what you’re going to do at university?

— I’ve had a new idea. Anthropology. I’ve contacted a couple of places.

— That’s what I’d do if I got to choose over again.

— It’s really good of you to come; you’re probably very busy. What do you do? I mean: what’s your job? Are you a musician?

— I gave up my job. Didn’t your father tell you?

— He’s never spoken to me about you.

Kate took that in without the coffee even quivering in the cup in her hand. She would have hated to think that David carelessly dropped scraps of information about her for his indifferent wife, in front of the children.

— Until this year I taught in the Slavic Studies department at Queen Mary. I worked on translations of Aksanov and Chekhov stories. Then I was bored with the academic life; anyway, my mother is ancient and dotty, and I was able to pretend I had to look after her. I took against the metropolis with all its uncomfortable excitements; I decided I would come home to Wales. I told myself that all the hidden poetry of life was in the in-between-sized cities where you can walk home from the theatre in the evening, and everywhere you go you meet the same crowd of people.

— And is it OK?

— It’s almost too much: childhood, youth, the past. I was safer in London where my life ran shallowly. I may have made a terrible mistake.

— But you can always get away again. Apart from your mother of course.

— Oh, she’ll live for ever! Then Kate put down her cup in its saucer with an apologetic sigh. — That wasn’t tactful, was it? Considering what we’re here to talk about.

— I don’t mind about my mother being dead. I can’t really remember anything else.

— In future the therapists will drag it all out.

— Was she like you are?

— Don’t tell me that’s why you’ve wanted to see me? Because you think I’m like your mother? I can’t tell you how much Francesca would have hated to be compared to me! She was to begin with — you must know this — tall and rather beautiful. A princess.